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?
The city I grew up in (population around 30,000) made HOAs mandatory for any development of 5 or more homes. Why? The city council got fed up mediating disputes between neighbors. People would go and expect the city council to get involved if their neighbors fence was ugly, or the lawn was unkept, or their party was too big. It started happening every meeting so they decided forcing everyone into an HOA would force them to solve it themselves.
So instead of directing them to civil court (or tell the karens to piss off), they made everyone suffer.... classic government.
Everyone? How many people who are not petty assholes have a negative HOA story? A bad HOA is like bad plastic surgery: those are the only ones you notice.