I think you got that right!
Moonman, your comment in post #21: HOA's have their pros and cons. But if a person is too much of a narcissist to live in one, they shouldn't. That way everybody wins.
There are as many narcissists in HOA neighborhoods as there are in free neighborhoods. They are the ones offended when the dad and son across the street build a tree-house in their yard or put a basketball hoop in their driveway. The narcissists are outraged when the guy down the street retires and buys an old car as a restoration project where his garage is the shop, leaving his regular car parked in the driveway overnight.
The narcissists are like an in-view former neighbor of mine, who sold her house and moved because her next-door neighbor had the temerity to, on a bleak hillside of timid off-white and bandaid-beige "Mediterranean" $3 million "villas," paint his home a rich deep Golden Gate red. The guy beat his HOA on that one, though it cost everybody over there $$, and my view is better for it.
HOAs have done more to kill personal creative productivity in America than any other development. Their FORCED homogenous sterility results from overwhelming regulation. Buying a piece of property and doing a one-off, with all of the codes and regulations and zoning requirements, is too expensive. In such a "free" market, mass-produced neighborhoods have become THE NORM in most new housing whether it is entry-level, middle range, or luxury high end.
Many if not most people are in HOAs because that's all that was available.
"Live and let live" is the best policy. If you're lucky enough to find an HOA where that is the prevailing sentiment, great. Most young families who live in them have no idea of what it could be like. They're like birds raised in cages. They would be lost if they were "allowed" to do what they please in their yards and with their homes. The "right to be offended" dominates sentiment in most HOAs.
Chuck Yeager said it best in American terms: "I've always said that the rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own -- and as far as I was concerned, that never described me or my friends."
HOAs are so ... European! Communist, more like.
Indeed. What good is it to buy if you re treated as a renter. and to destroy competition they lobby for regs too, such as being against living off the grid. agenda 21.
Decentralizing government and moving it toward the people is very Reaganesque. Like I said, if you don’t like it, then stay away and everybody will be happier.
If you want to live like an anarchist, breed rats in your yard and paint your house yellow and green, then buy a trailer outside the city limits.
Truth worth repeating.