Banned is maybe too far, but why should we as a country allow people to have petty power over meaningless things their neighbors do? Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it's sold the new owners have to opt in?
For the most part, I'm wondering about this in the context of single family homes since for homes like condos, you could make the case that HOAs are useful for shared things like roofs and whatnot. Maybe limit mandatory HOA involvement to things like what's truly necessary and shared and not how tall your grass is?
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned it yet, but HOAs are a holdover of practices to keep minorities from moving into neighborhoods. They still are sets of discriminatory practices, reinventing themselves in pettier ways.
Tl;dr fuck HOAs.
Imagine Bob is a city construction worker with a work vehicle. He and his wife both park in the driveway, so he has to park the work vehicle on the street. The HOA digs up a rule to keep slapping fines on his vehicle because Bob is “making the neighborhood unsightly,” aka neighbor Jane doesn’t want to live in a “blue-collar” neighborhood.