I somewhat agree but think "freely entering into" oversells it a bit. On one hand in a very literal sense sure, nobody is going to send you to jail for buying a

I somewhat agree but think "freely entering into" oversells it a bit. On one hand in a very literal sense sure, nobody is going to send you to jail for buying a home without an HOA... but it's also not something you really get to pick yourself, the house's history does and you're "free" to pick a different house not anything about the HOA itself. That doesn't inherently mean HOAs are wrong in my book but I can also see why folks don't like to say you're free to pick in that there are certain useful forms of the meaning of free that aren't present. The trouble in terminology is that might not align with everyone's default interpretation of what free means when they talk about it. It reminds me of topics of "free speech" where you have some literal absolutist that mean any speech should be allowed and the more typical approach which means more or less "mildly restricted speech" where what is restricted is often assumed to be the same but is often subtly different.