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 have a likely rather unique viewpoint as someone who's HOA just had their whole board resign and be replaced after a scandal came out proving they weren't legitimate:
Ours basically only maintains the local park & roads & lights and negotiates fair rates for trash pickup and fuel deliveries for everyone, sort of like how a union can get better wages (if it's just for this purpose it's called a collective btw)
Why doesn't the city, you may ask? We're in unincorporated county land: there is no city to do maintenance work on these things, so without it things would be.... Worse, here
Though in most places yeah, they shouldn't exist
Probably shouldn't be able to live there in the first place, frankly. It's a problem covering a problem caused by another problem. we have a very poorly built society.