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?
Gonna take a controversial tack here:
No, they shouldn't be banned.
You have a choice to buy into an HOA or not. You can still buy plots of land, and build to suit; you are not obligated or limited solely to houses that already exist in HOAs. Yes, your up-front costs will be higher, because you're going to have to pay for putting in a well, septic system, and possibly running electric to your place, and if you want gas you'll need propane deliveries, versus hooking in to an existing water/sewer/electric/natural gas system. But that's still your choice.
Some people want HOAs because them come with amenities that people wouldn't have otherwise. In my area, there are two very large HOAs that both offer things like full golf courses, and horse stables with miles of trails for riding; the people buying in those HOAs buy into them because of those things; having enough land on your own to keep and ride horses is, well, good luck finding that much land as a single parcel within reasonable driving distance of any city.
Finally, if you buy a home, most of the time you want to know that your home isn't going to plummet in value. You're dropping a LOT of money on one, and hoping that, if you ever need to move, you'll be able to get the money you put in back out again. When you don't live in an HOA, there's always a risk that the things shitty neighbors will do will end up wrecking your property values. E.g., if the person right next to me starts parking dead cars in their driveway, and has yard dogs that are barking at all hours of the night, not many people are going to willingly move in next to them.
Do I LIKE HOAs? Not really. The best HOAs are the ones that have absolutely minimal interference in your daily life. I live in an HOA; they keep the road functional, specify certain aspects of new construction (minimum size--no tiny homes--colors have to be earth-tones, etc.) and... That's about it. Yeah, I'm supposed to get permission before I put in any yard statues more than 6' tall, and I'm not allowed to clear cut the trees on my property (...not that I ever plan to...), I can't put a pistol range in my yard and practice shooting at home, but that's about all. As long as I stay quiet, and mind my own business, the HOA doesn't give a shit. The most high-handed thing they've done in the last decade was amend the by-laws to ban short-term rentals; one shithead was renting out their place as an AirBnB, which led to loud parties on weekends and a lot of extra traffic.
This is one of those "choices that isn't really a choice." In theory I can live somewhere without an HOA. In theory I can also buy a home that is shaped like a wizard tower. Good luck actually finding one though. In many areas, cities require HOAs for new developments. And even when not, very very few HOAs are formed by people voluntarily coming together and choosing to democratically establish one. They are imposed by the developer. The HOA is laid down before the first house is even sold.
What this means in most American cities is that the HOA-free neighborhoods are in expensive older neighborhoods close to the urban core. The still kindof affordable houses on the urban fringe are all HOA neighborhoods. The wealthy get the choice of living with an HOA or not. Working people either have to live with an HOA or live in an apartment. They don't actually get the choice of an affordable HOA-free neighborhood.
HOAs should be banned for new developments. The only way to establish one should be that home owners in an existing neighborhood voluntarily come together to create one. Democracy in action. And they should require continual community buy in. Let them expire every after ten years unless 2/3 of the home owners sign up to renew them. Do the people in the HOA feel it gives them value? Then they can keep it as long as they want. But it should require continual community buy-in.
I have no problem with people who want to live in an HOA having an HOA. In practice, however, most people in an HOA did not really choose to live in an HOA. They simply wanted to stop renting, and the HOA neighborhood was the only one they could afford.
You don't have to live on the fringe; you can make a choice to live farther out. Assuming that it meets building codes for the state you live in, you can build that wizard tower if you want to.
You say that it's a choice that's not a choice, but that's only if you make a lot of other choices first; I want to live in X area, I want Y schools, and so on. I'm in the process of trying to sell a home so that I can make a choice to move to an extremely rural area, where it will be >100 miles to the closest area that you could reasonably call a "city". (There are a few towns closer, but they're all <6000 people.) I'm making that choice, and making the choice to take a pay cut to do it, because I value silence, solitude, and nature more than I value convenience or money.
As far as your idea of voluntarily signing up for an HOA ex post facto... That seems very unreasonable to me. Functionally that means that if 2/3 of your neighbors agree to it, you could suddenly have people all up in your shit when that wasn't the terms you signed up for, and your only recourse is trying to sell and move.
TBH, I think that what would make the most sense for the most people are high-density high rise condos near a city center. The idea of a house on a postage stamp of land with a 1/4 acre lawn that needs to be mowed every week, etc., is a bullshit dream that was sold in the 50s when car culture really started taking off. If your condos are built well--concrete slab walls and floors to deaden noise--you're not really losing anything over moving out to the 'burbs, but you're gaining more time in the form of shorter commutes. Unfortunately, the way taxation and zoning works, it's cheaper to pave over a farmer's field in an unincorporated area and build a lot of low-quality cookie-cutter houses than it is to build condos in the city.