I came to understand the reason HOA's/POA's are almost ubiquitous in housing developments built in the last 25-30 years or anywhere but old neighborhoods and custom home sites. It's simple. The developer has a fuduciary duty to the investors to form an HOA to protect the value of the development until the last house is sold. Sometimes there are common property areas, so called "greenbelts," that are required by the town, city, or county planning commission to issue the development permit and those areas must be maintained in perpetuity. Sometimes there's more elaborate club houses and pools and so on. Even if there isn't any common property at all, the developer is going to put up an HOA. Imagine if they're building 900 houses in three phases. They build the first 300 and sell them. They start to build the next 300, but already there's cars on blocks, major appliances in the front yard, dead lawns, and the streets are clogged with RV's with their sewer hoses dumping into the storm drains. That would make it hard to get the prices the investors were expecting.
I'm not defending HOA's, just explaining why they're nearly ubiquitous in any contemporary development. A person can escape the communism of HOA's by buying a 50 year old home and remodeling it or building a custom home on an undeveloped lot, but it comes at a cost of time and money. I don't know what else to recommend. Can a homeowner's bill of rights stop evil HOA's from the most egregious harrassment?
