Excerpts from "Cities and Homeowner Associations" by Yale Professor Robert C. Ellickson "A third candidate for the exercise of decentralized power: the privat

Excerpts from "Cities and Homeowner Associations" by Yale Professor Robert C. Ellickson "A third candidate for the exercise of decentralized power: the private homeowners association. The association, not the busi- ness corporation, is the obvious private alternative to the city. Like a city, an association enables households that have clustered their activities in a territorially defined area to enforce rules of conduct, to provide "public goods" (such as open space), and to pursue other common goals they could not achieve without some form of potentially coercive central authority. Although they were relatively exotic as recently as twenty years ago, homeowners associations now outnumber cities. Developers create thousands of new associations each year to govern their subdivisions, condominiums, and planned communities. I discern only one important difference between the two forms of organization-the sometimes involuntary nature of membership in a city versus the perfectly voluntary nature of membership in a homeowners association." https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&context=fss_papers https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...