No. Should they be as pervasive as they are with unbounded layers of beurocracy? Also no.

I think people might not understand how many assholes live around you that the HOA keeps in check. I didn't until I joined the board. Sometimes you have to litigate, but sometimes you also just need a dedicated (and elected) group of people to go knock on the door and talk out a problem. It's nicer to have this somewhat regulated (bank accounts, insurance, taxes, and yes even covenants for procedure if they are kept up to date) than to just knock on some doors and wing it.

If your HOA has an old lady measuring your grass and some dude using color swatches to check the paint on your mailbox, move. If your neighborhood has lights, clear sidewalks, fences and landscaping that are cared for, and no dog crap to step in, keep paying into it. They are doing a good job.

Objectively yes. We don't need an extra government to cover the job of the actual government, especially not ones that are easy for psychopaths to infiltrate. Your park? That's the damn state's responsibility, pay your fair share of taxes instead and let the city handle it. Your home value? Don't treat housing as a damn vehicle for investment. All those nasty poors and minorities? If they bother you find a way to leave earth, permanently.

HOAs are emblematic of everything wrong with America and actively strip away the good parts.

The point of HOAs is protecting/increasing property value. We need property to be cheaper, not more expensive. Higher property values benefit speculation, not ownership. Burn them all.

I don't want to live in a neighborhood where you can leave a car to rot on the front lawn, where you can have cows shitting all over, or you can build a 20 foot tall Jesus statue in your front yard.

If your HOA sucks, then get involved and make it better. Mine is fine.

Don't ban them, there are some good parts in there

Require yearly elections on who leads

Limit the power they have, especially with giving out citations

Don't allow to outsource the work. You want a HOA, you do the HOA. Those HOA companies are thr worst

I wouldn't ban them, but I would make sure they need continual community buy-in to keep going. Make them automatically sunset if not renewed. Like, every ten years you have to get signatures from 2/3 of the home owners in the HOA in order to renew it. Good HOAs can keep going indefinitely or be reestablished later. Bad ones just disappear when they can't get enough signatures to keep the thing going.

I don't have a problem with people volunteering to bind themselves into a communal covenant. I do have a problem with the long dead hand of developers past binding people into a perpetual obligation. I know it is possible to dissolve HOAs, but it requires getting the vast majority of homeowners to come together to actively choose to revoke it. I would use the opposite system. Every ten years you need a supermajority of homeowners to commit to renewing it.

This is obviously in the context of single family homes. They're unavoidable in condos.

My neighborhood's HOA has been pretty chill the few years I've lived here. The fees pay for the pool, landscaping, walking path maintenance, etc. Maybe I'd feel different if one of my neighbors was finding and reporting a bunch of violations, but so far it seems like the HOA has been good for my neighborhood. I'm sure other places get out of hand, but it's not always the nightmare people make it out to be online.

I think at least HOA’s should be banned from requiring certain plants in your yard. Namely grass. HOA’s should not be able to prevent people from replacing their lawns with native and edible plants.

I think HOAs and Business Improvement districts persist because they fill a need for hyper local government that the existing, formal governments are not fullfilling. HOAs don't need to be banned, they need to be replaced with something else that better fulfills this niche but is more regulated and accountable.

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.

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.

Anyone who's in favor of HOA's should watch Hot Fuzz.