>>no one bugs me if my lawn is looking sad. But in other ways it would be nice to have a unified group to take care of some neighborhood things, like unifying garbage pickup since we have private garbage companies here:

In many locations neither of those items are purview of the HOA, those would be City ordinances and City Services.

HOA's in my experience fit 2 molds, with some over lap

The first takes care of common property of the community, like playgrounds, community centers, etc.

Then you have rules enforcement, which are beyond the standard city rules like length of grass, in the realm of the type and style of grass you can have, the plants you can have, the color of the home, the type of (or if you can) have a pool, or structure, or Playground, etc etc etc.

These HOA expanded on what would be normal governmental regulations around safety, and go into the realm of "property value" protection, and other ascetics needs of the community

My town has no interest in operating garbage service. A few of the area villages do have village-provided garbage service and often the quality and cost is less than the private companies, but it seems garbage service is not a big enough deal for people to try and unite over it.

Pools and structures like decks or sheds are regulated by the building code of the town, but they do not impact your property value for property taxes. Pools specifically also don't seem to impact property value when you sell, a pool is only useful here for 3 months of the year and lots of people don't want to deal with maintaining them. I would happily pay an HOA to take care of a nice neighborhood pool instead of maintaining my own but I've never seen a local single-family home neighborhood with a community pool here.

Well my city has no interest in operating one either, instead they force me to pay a high monthly fee, then find the lowest bid contractor they can to do a shitty job of collecting my trash sometimes... (paying the contractor about 1/4 of the amount the city charges me for the service) while preventing any competing company from offering residential pickup anywhere in the city limits.

That is probably because upstate NY does not have new housing developments. All housing developments built from scratch since the 2000s that I have seen have HOAs. Many from 1980s and 1990s. Once the HOA is in place by the original developer, it is rare to get the votes needed to remove the HOA.

My neighborhood was built starting around 2005-2006. Then during 2008-ish building paused for a bit, then resumed around 2012, then paused again around 2014, then resumed around 2018. It's now complete. There's lots of new single-family home neighborhoods being built in my town, afaict none of them have HOAs.

Where is this? I am familiar with developments in CA/WA/OR/TX/TN/FL.

All the FL/TX ones even come with gates.

I live in Webster, NY. It's a suburb of Rochester, NY. There's not a TON of new developments but there's a steady stream of new builds around the various suburbs of Rochester, Buffalo, and Syracuse. Mostly it seems like younger families buying these new builds.

what ever money save from garbage pickup will be vastly outdone by the enormous waste an HOA brings. Our HOA costs me 2K per year (that's a whole tesla every 20 years = 40K). And the only thing they do is take care of a couple of benches, blow some leaves off a few bushes, maybe a few sprinklers in a green area and 2 big white fences. Other than that, all the money goes to administration and inspectors that go around citing people for planting trees, etc. Now, our neighborhood does look really great but it's not because of the HOA, it's because we have larger lots and nice housing architecture and people take care of their properties really nicely (HOA doesn't do any of that).

Two unrelated comments:

1) The conspiracy theory is that intentionally pointless HOAs were pushed by small government folks as a way to make people skeptical of tax-for-service organizations.

2) The HOAs point isn’t to regulate the 99% of people who would otherwise maintain their house. It’s for the 1% of people that wouldn’t and in order to avoid housing discrimination charges, you have to regulate everyone equally.

Do HOAs even exist outside the US? I don't know of anything similar in Australia other than body corporate organizations for blocks of units but their scope (and cost) is far more limited. All the other services seemingly provided by HOAs in the US would all be local government provided here. I assumed it was much the same elsewhere in the (developed) world...

HOA's generally exist in places that followed the US's 20th century 'white/wealthy flight' model. Prominent examples include Argentina, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.

This is representative of the core conflict of American politics that makes it so confusing to outsiders - ideologically, the people in power (often delusionally) identify with Europe, but in practice, they desire power dynamics similar to oligopolies seen in the developing world.

Not to go too far with the metaphor, but if America never established race-based slavery (and instead, racial minorities were primarily the small number of remaining Native Americans), I bet we'd have a similar political system to Australia (where overtly exclusionary practices are more frowned upon).

We had something pretty close on the sugar plantations in the 19th century. But interestingly it was very much an exclusionary government policy to relocate most of them back to the south sea islands. Australia has plenty to be ashamed of in our treatment of anyone non-white historically.

I'm dubious. HOAs were created to do an end run around Shelley vs Kraemer.