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June 4, 2004
condos, gated communities, and shadow governments
Montréal: I’m at a Liberty Fund conference on private neighborhood associations. The Liberty Fund is a basically libertarian foundation that organizes more than 100 small conferences a year. The participants are not all libertarians—or else I would not have been invited.
It turns out that some 50 million Americans now live in some kind of community governed by an association: a condominium, cooperative, or a planned community with a board. Often a developer subdivides some land or constructs an apartment building and sells the units with deeds that (a) impose numerous rules on the buyer; and (b) create a board or other body that can legislate further and enforce existing rules.
These are voluntary associations: you don’t have to buy a house or an apartment in any particular condo or planned community. At the same time, they act like governments, taxing, regulating and fining residents and enforcing their decisions in courts. Indeed, they are more powerful than conventional governments, which are restrained by the Constitution of the United States. Residential associations can, and actually have, banned the display of signs critical of themselves, banned the sales of certain newspapers, even banned the private possession of materials they deem pornographic. The rationale for these rules is to increase property values, although the rules may also have other purposes, benign or malevolent.
These quasi-governments raise questions of interest to libertarians and others. For example:
June 4, 2004 12:05 AM | category: philosophy | Comments
Comments
How on earth does a Homeowner's association enforce a "porn" ban? Do they retain the right to search people's homes?
Out here in California, signing away rights to the condo association is the norm, since these are the homes most of us have some ghost of a chance of affording.
We need another Malvina Reynolds to sing about "Little Boxes".
June 4, 2004 1:39 AM | Comments (4) | posted by Bill Humphries
Bill,
I don't know the answer to your enforcement question--perhaps the boards relied on informants. By the way, the associations that banned pornography were created by Charles Keating, of Keating-Five fame.
Incidentally, homeowners associations are most common in your part of the country--44% are in the West.
Peter
June 4, 2004 8:23 AM | Comments (4) | posted by Peter Levine
As I'm looking at a condo as the affordable option to get into a house (unless I can find a way to get Mountain View to okay me building one of the interesting options at http://fabprefab.com/) the notorious homeowner's association is something I'm going to have to deal with.
Did you know that we don't even get the right to a secret ballot in HOA buisness? Today I learned that state legislature is looking at a law that would require secret ballots in some, but not all HOA votes.
June 10, 2004 3:14 AM | Comments (4) | posted by Bill Humphries
The seminal work that deals with the future of gated communities is Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
June 29, 2004 10:39 PM | Comments (4) | posted by James