Americans love things that keep the "undesirable" people out. HOAs are basically just white gatekeepers. They're legally backed rackets in every instance I've ever had to interact with them.
This does not match my personal experience. I live in a 10,000 person neighborhood that is covered by an HOA, and it is a very diverse place. In fact, one of the things that I like about living here is that there are people from all over the world living here.
I'm genuinely glad that is the experience you've had. I hope that model would be the one that's more common.
Unfortunately in my experience it's the exact opposite. Here they're used and abused by exclusively rich, mostly-white neighborhoods to keep them that way.
You may be conflating class and race (it's a common error). A neighborhood of wealthier, successful people (regardless of race) probably want their neighborhood to be a quieter, nice-looking, pleasant place.
I've lived in both HOA and non-HOA neighborhoods. If there's a barrier to entry such as price, then generally a more successful (and hopefully more refined) type of person will move in, and generally the homes will stay nice-looking without rules. Without that, then an HOA to try to maintain an aesthetic baseline can be very helpful. All the homeowners benefit from maintaining an attractive neighborhood, in that their home values will be higher.
This matches my experience. Our neighborhood is rich in a mix of housing. There are large apartment buildings with small, relatively affordable apartments, townhouse of 2 sizes, and then single family homes that run from large to very large. I assume that the many people who own one-bedroom condos are just as interested as the people who own the six-bedroom houses in keeping the common areas well maintained.
I'm not conflating class and race, I'm establishing a connection between the two. I'm very aware that it's generally a "rich" thing. That doesn't mean that race plays no factor, and even then, if it's purely a class issue then it's still an issue in my eyes.
Please elaborate on how they keep "undesirable" people out - a statement like this has no meaning without any evidence. The HOA is not involved in the purchase of a house in any way.
Most HOAs have enough legalese baked into them that they can even hold eviction over tenants heads. It's absolutely a class weapon that gets used as a bludgeon. And if they can't technically evict you, they sure can make your life hell until you leave. Selective enforcement is the name of the game with these types.
American Dad covered this - Roger decided to get back at Stan so corrupted the HOA and did all sorts of things like arranging trash pickup, installing a hydrant on his lawn, etc.
If the HOA don’t like you, it seems there little recourse.
And they absolutely will. After I moved out of my last HOA, I found out the towing company had a flat rate kickback to the HOA organization for every tow they made. Genuinely baffles me how it's even legal.
The HOA can not restrict purchase sure, but can specifically target PoC for "violations" while ignoring the white households who are committing violations. This has the effect of working to force these folks out and maintaining the racial status quo of the HOA.
In the 70s (I think) and before, HOA were definitely active gatekeepers though against PoC, and then after that with new laws passed, moved to these more "subtle" methods.
The HOA's had rules that black and other undesirables weren't allowed. Enforceable since HOA's were a private associations.
However the supreme court also ruled that was unenforceable too.
But that didn't happen before developers realized that they could use HOA's as a cash cow. You sell a house once. But you can collect HOA dues for a couple of decades after. There is a case in Daily City where it took decades for home owners to get rid of the HOA. That collected dues and provided absolutely nothing in return.
