Banned? No. Regulated to rein in power? Yes.

My HOA has mellowed a bit over the years. Nowadays, 27 years after the subdivision was built, they negotiate for decent landscaping service, and make sure people don't leave trash and junk cars in their yard, that's about it. I'm happy enough with how they operate. I don't own a lawn mower or a rake.

Some HOAs are run like mini fiefdoms, though.

I won't live in an HOA. But that being said, I don't really have an issue with other people wanting to live in an HOA.

However, I do not like the fact that the HOA has permanent authority over any property you purchase inside of its zone.

I feel like there should be a specific and reasonable amount of money that you can pay in order to exempt your home from the HOA permanently, a method to break the HOA contract at least for as long as you live there.

Like maybe the HOA could reinstate the contract once you move out, and the next owner would have to break it again, but at least while you're living there, you should be able to be exempt from them if you so choose.

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.

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

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 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

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned it yet, but HOAs are a holdover of practices to keep minorities from moving into neighborhoods. They still are sets of discriminatory practices, reinventing themselves in pettier ways.

Tl;dr fuck HOAs.

Imagine Bob is a city construction worker with a work vehicle. He and his wife both park in the driveway, so he has to park the work vehicle on the street. The HOA digs up a rule to keep slapping fines on his vehicle because Bob is “making the neighborhood unsightly,” aka neighbor Jane doesn’t want to live in a “blue-collar” neighborhood.

Most HOAs are run by assholes.

But when run properly they keep neighborhoods clean and safe.

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.

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 they have the potential to be good if they were way more democratic, but they're never run that way.

When I lived in a townhouse that was part of an HOA that had some nice things going for it. There were a couple tennis courts, a swimming pool, a communal garden, a club house thing you can pay to use, they regularly mowed the front yards and trimmed the front hedges and they would periodically repaint the fronts of the houses. However, while I was living there, the head of the HOA was a douche that kept misusing funds.

The house my sister lives in has an HOA that does literally nothing except bitch residents to upkeep their lawn.

Currently live in an HOA that won't even let people put up actual privacy fences around their back yards so every fucking dog for 8 houses in either direction can see each other when they go outside and bark non-stop. So yea, fuck HOAs.

I think we should just aggressively limit their authority. Essentially saying you can't make a contract that exceeds our defined limits. If you do, the entire contract is void, not just the parts that cross the line. Let's put them on eggshells so they don't lose what little authority we allow them to have. I live in a suburb with no HOA. Really missing city community though.

I think I can offer some perspective as someone who works in the real estate industry and is on an HOA BOD.

Of the hundreds of clients I've worked with, only 1 ever wanted an HOA, because he didn't have one and it was awful. We're talking fences laid on the ground, grass several feet high, vehicles parked all over the front lawn, the entire yard front and back being used as a landfill, you name it.

HOAs are essentially the smallest form of government. The HOA carries the force of law. This also tends to attract the worst people for the job. Think about it; who's going to take time out of their day to volunteer on behalf of the community? People who want power over others.

People are petty as fuck. One person receives one citation and they become salty and begin seeking out and reporting every single violation they can find, which just makes it awful to live in.

Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it's sold the new owners have to opt in?

That would completely invalidate the purpose of the HOA.

HOAs can be really good things but have all the same problems as regular democracies, mainly voter apathy. If the members of the HOA don't keep informed about the issues in the neighborhood, don't attend meetings, and don't vote, then you very quickly end up with a few assholes gaining power and doing whatever they want.

Most of the suggestions I see in the comments would also render HOAs powerless and essentially pointless.

I like my HOA, but I live in a condo building. We all pitch in to keep the roof repaired and the common areas cleaned, and the few rules just make life tolerable in such a confined space (quiet hours, for example). I can't imagine what good an HOA does for single-family homes.

Yes, definitely. They’re just bullies trying to rebrand themselves.

Yes

You can have community orgs that don't make you pay fees as a condition of owning your home.

A thousand times YES

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.

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.

A lot of things an hoa covers is already covered by the township here so I'm unsure why you'd join one. But they're also not as common here because of that. I know some neighbors tried ages ago and something like 80 percent told those prone to screw off.

Should HOAs be banned?

That's an easy one:

YES!!!

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.

for regular ass house on a regular ass street, yes. exceptions are made for condominiums, apartment complexes and gated communities.