Banned is maybe too far, but why should we as a country allow people to have petty power over meaningless things their neighbors do? Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it's sold the new owners have to opt in?
For the most part, I'm wondering about this in the context of single family homes since for homes like condos, you could make the case that HOAs are useful for shared things like roofs and whatnot. Maybe limit mandatory HOA involvement to things like what's truly necessary and shared and not how tall your grass is?
pretty sure HOAs exist everywhere, you kinda need an entity to coordinate local amenities like water pipes and roads. The problem in the US is just that HOAs can make up any arbitrary requirements they want and no one seems to give a shit.
in sane countries HOA-equivalents have pretty strict limits on what they can and cannot do, generally their ability to outright ban things is limited to extreme cases like someone painting their house magenta and lime stripes or having 8 cows in their backyard.
Here, this is 100% the councils job. There are no HOAs here with curtain twitchers that tell you that you have to keep your grass this green.