HOAs vary a lot. My mom is in an HOA because they shovel the snow to her front door in window. Really she lives in a 4 unit apartment where everyone has separate entrances and they are allowed to paint the walls and otherwise change the interior as they want. Which is to say for her needs she has the best of both apartment living and single family house living at the same time. The HOA does all exterior maintenance, and is a good deal.

There are also HOAs that place a lot of weird restrictions on what you can do. It really depends on the HOA, some are good, some are very bad.

That said, for the place where I personally am in life, a HOA is bad and I refuse to live in one.

It’s in the deed so owning the property means you agree to follow the rules of the deed. The HOA can sue you for enforcement.

At a high level, anyone can sue you to enforce a deed term, as long as the organization/person with an interest is around to do it and knows to do it. As an easy example, a long time ago people added racist stuff to deeds, but those family descendants no longer enforce it. HOAs don’t die like people and collect dues so they don’t run out of legal fees.

You can try to get dead HOAs removed from a deed, and you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed. Obviously one is a lot easier because it doesn’t fight back. You can also get the residents to vote to dissolve an HOA. Some HOAs expire after so long if the residents don’t renew.

TLDR you can’t buy the house without agreeing to the HOA.

> you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed

I'd be curious about people's experiences and successes with this. Has anyone successfully pulled that off with a still-existing HOA?

Not entirely the same, but here in Canada (still common law), any housing covenants applied to a deed can be struck down if they are illegal. There were a bunch of houses with ancient unenforceable covenants like not selling homes to certain ethnic/religious groups and they were granted the right to no just ignore, but actually remove those causes from the deed. Transitively, I imagine any deeds for HOA rules and regulations that are illegal under the law could also be challenged under similar merits. I've got no examples of this though, so who knows.

That definitely seems like the easy case, sure.

I'd be extremely interested in cases of any modern HOA being successfully removed from a deed and thus rendered moot, ideally administratively without a massive legal battle.

You have to get all parties to agree to remove the restriction. I've heard of it happening.

> I can't imagine why someone would opt into one.

You cannot buy without being a part of the HOA.

Had occasion to visit my hometown last year, so I drove around the middle-class neighborhood where I grew up. People have trash, old appliances, rusting inoperable cars parked on the lawn, 4-foot grass and weeds growing. People who spent like a million bucks on a house don't want the neighborhood to be full of blight and trash.

In a typical average HOA neighborhood:

* The HOA pays for landscaping of all the common areas like green belts and parks within the tract. If you don't have an HOA, you either are benefiting from your city choosing to locate and maintain those kinds of amenities right by where you live, or you just don't get any of those.

* Obviously one of the big ones, the other main HOA budget item is pools, clubhouses you can rent cheaply for parties, tennis courts, etc. For rich people they don't care since they have their own pools, but it's a great boon to people not rich enough to have a pool to have easy free access to one that isn't crowded and is close to home.

* They, in theory, fine you for outwardly living like an absolute slob or selfish jerk. NOTE: In practice nobody cares about most of these little rules, like mailbox color or a patio chair left on your lawn, unless you're acting wildly outside the norms. The rules are there to let them enforce them selectively on the person who's making everyone miserable.

* They regulate architecture and paint color. This may be my least favorite because it seems like we shouldn't need this, I have taste and why should I have to submit my stuff for approval to these jerks? But really, this is only there because there would be SOMEBODY who would paint their house an absurd garish color or build a giant ugly addition in their front yard or something that looks wildly out of place.