Homeowners tend to treat the HOA like weather — something that was always there and can’t be argued with. It isn’t. The modern homeowners association is a fairly recent invention with a specific history and a specific purpose, and understanding both makes one thing clear: HOAs didn’t spread because they were good for homeowners. They spread because they were good for developers and for the governments that used them to move public costs onto private residents.
Where HOAs came from
The DNA of the HOA is the restrictive covenant — a promise written into a property deed that runs with the land and binds every future owner. Covenants go back to the 1800s, but their darkest and most widespread early use came in the early 20th century, when developers wrote racially restrictive covenants into deeds to bar Black, Jewish, and immigrant families from buying homes. The U.S. Supreme Court held those racial covenants judicially unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), and the federal Fair Housing Act finally outlawed housing discrimination in 1968 — but the mechanism, the deed covenant that controls what owners may do, survived and became the backbone of the modern HOA.
The explosion came after World War II. The G.I. Bill and cheap federally backed mortgages sent millions of families into new suburbs — Levittown, built starting in 1947, was the template. These tracts came wrapped in covenants dictating everything from paint colors to laundry lines, and someone had to enforce them. That someone became the homeowners association. As development accelerated through the 1960s and beyond — and the industry organized, forming its national trade group in the early 1970s — HOAs went from a few thousand associations to hundreds of thousands, now home to tens of millions of Americans.
Who HOAs were really built to serve
Two groups drove the growth, and neither was the resident:
- Developers could build denser and cheaper, hand off the long-term upkeep of streets, drainage, and amenities to a resident-funded association, and market the result as a “managed community” that would protect property values.
- Local governments could approve those subdivisions without taking on the public cost of serving them — because the HOA would privately pay for what the city would otherwise owe.
The quiet deal: how governments benefit
This is the part that rarely gets said out loud. When a subdivision is built as an HOA community, the roads, sidewalks, streetlights, storm drainage, parks, and landscaping that a municipality would normally build and maintain get privatized — paid for and maintained by the association, out of homeowners’ assessments. Cities and counties approve those developments more readily precisely because the public budget is spared. And here’s the catch:
What that makes an HOA
An association that assesses you (a tax by another name), writes rules that bind your property, fines you, and can place a lien on or even foreclose on your home is doing the work of a local government. But it is not a government — it’s a private corporation. So residents get the burdens of a local government (mandatory payments, rules, enforcement) without the protections: the constitutional limits, the transparency and open-records guarantees, the elections with real oversight, and the accountability that bind an actual city. In Arizona, the state agency that hears HOA disputes is a limited, after-the-fact venue, and no state body regulates the management companies themselves. It is, in effect, a shadow government that residents fund twice and can hold to account far less.
Why it’s fair to ask government to stop leaning on them
None of this is an argument that neighbors shouldn’t organize or that shared amenities are bad. It’s an argument about who decided this, why, and who pays. If HOAs proliferated because they let developers cut costs and let governments offload public responsibilities, then the people carrying that cost have every right to ask their state, county, and local governments to reconsider the arrangement. Reasonable things to ask for:
- Stop mandating HOAs as a routine condition of subdivision approval, so a community association is a genuine choice rather than a requirement baked into the land.
- Stop offloading core public functions onto unaccountable private associations without oversight — or acknowledge the double payment and adjust for it.
- Provide real oversight and remedies that match the power HOAs actually hold, including over the management companies that run them.
- Strengthen the statutory floor of homeowner rights — the “notwithstanding any provision in the community documents” protections are the only reason homeowners have any leverage at all.
The bottom line
The HOA is not a fact of nature — it’s a policy choice that governments made because it was cheaper for them and profitable for developers. Policy choices can be revisited. Knowing the real history is the first step: you’re not powerless in the face of something ancient and inevitable. You’re a taxpayer who is being asked to fund and obey a private government, and you’re allowed to ask the actual government why. For the tools you have today, start with the laws that govern HOAs and the governance self-audit.