Hal Rothman tells why HOAs are now viewed as a necessary evil

Sunday, March 12, 2006 | 7:24 a.m.

Everybody hates homeowners' associations. The renowned social critic Mike Davis calls them "microscopically parochial interests" and others describe them as a tool of developers wielded against the homeowners they're supposed to serve. Even my students groan at their mention.

In a society that prizes individual rights above all else, homeowners' associations are oppressive, parochial, tyrannical and downright mean.

Everyone, or at least anyone who was late with an association dues check, has their horror story. They built a back porch that was not even visible from the street and spent a year wrangling with the self-important people on the architectural committee. A missed payment racked up thousands of dollars in fines.

Nobody, except developers and the tight-lipped creeps who run for board seats and want to snoop in your back yard, likes homeowners' associations. Nobody, not even members of the boards themselves, trusts them.

But homeowners' associations play a significant role in the new Las Vegas, one that makes those of us who are willing to put their civic rights in a blind trust, and stipulate to property values as the pinnacle of American civilization, tolerate them. Especially in transient places such as Las Vegas or where larger, communitywide institutions are in decline - which is to say everywhere - homeowners' associations stand as what remains of the social fabric of the mythic America.

With confidence in state and national government at an all-time low and local government increasingly regarded as the province of special interests, the homeowners' association is a hedge against decline. They have become the closest thing to the grass-roots democracy Alexis de Tocqueville envisioned when he wrote about the United States in the 1830s. At the same time, they assure the conformity of image that is at the heart of stability in a liberal consumerist society.

All you have to do is look at neighborhoods without associations. Usually, they are less consistent, more erratic and worn. Nice houses abut those with trashed yards, broken windows and cars on blocks. One bad house on a block ruins all the homes around it.

Done properly, homeowners' associations function in place of community relationships, of the shame of being the worst house or yard on the block, of sharing life with your neighbors.

In more than one middle-class subdivision in Las Vegas, the homeowners' association fee pays for maintenance of front yards. Close enough to feel insecure about the potential of their streets to fall from desirable to the dreaded "transitional," neighborhoods embrace an ethic of enforced order. Every lawn is eternally and uniformly green and manicured.

But by default, homeowners' associations assume an undefined role that inspires resentment. In Las Vegas neighborhoods where houses turn over at astonishing rates, where proximity and sociability are often unrelated and most life goes on in walled-in back yards, the temptation to hire a semiprivate pseudopolice force to protect the value of your single largest investment is vast.

No wonder that even people who aren't crazy about such organizations accept them. Homeowners' associations maintain what passes for community. You can complain about your neighbor's dog without confronting your neighbor.

In a strange way, the homeowners' association smacks of an earlier America, one in which Paul Revere might be comfortable. Revere and his 18th-century contemporaries understood individual freedom as something located within the community's standards. They were free to do as they pleased, they thought, within the boundaries that the community established for behavior.

The reach to homeowners' associations as tacit reflections of community standards, albeit, a cynic might say, of a lazy and dissolute community, is not hard. The community stood in for the individual and the individual agreed to abide by the rules - as long as they primarily applied to other people.

But everyone still hates their homeowners' association and the rules it makes. They want to restrict others and not themselves, more evidence of a self-indulgent, self-centered world where people have abandoned any conception of mutually agreed-upon coercion.

The issue is larger than Las Vegas, but it has manifested itself in our new suburbs.

Almost every new home in Las Vegas' future will be part of a homeowners' association. A bland but oppressive authority at the grass roots follows, where board members inflict their personal biases on their neighbors to the echoes of resounding resentment. Tocqueville's democracy? Closer to the world of novelist Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age," where authorities tattoo "poor impulse control" on the foreheads of miscreants. Twenty-first century community has its own pitfalls.