Banned is maybe too far, but why should we as a country allow people to have petty power over meaningless things their neighbors do? Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it's sold the new owners have to opt in?
For the most part, I'm wondering about this in the context of single family homes since for homes like condos, you could make the case that HOAs are useful for shared things like roofs and whatnot. Maybe limit mandatory HOA involvement to things like what's truly necessary and shared and not how tall your grass is?
When I lived in a single-family house, there was technically an HOA formed when the development was, well, developed. Everyone forgot about it until someone wanted to build on an addition to their home. They asked the town for building permission, town said "what'd the HOA say?" and the homeowners went "oh, shoot", and formed a quick entity to rubber-stamp plans. No dues or anything.
The only other thing they did was send out annual reminders to have your septic system pumped please (we had communal drainage fields but per-house septic tanks).
I'm good with that sort of HOA for single-family homes.
That's cool it was easy-peasy, but would also have been a prime opportunity to dissolve the HOA (which, I believe, the HOA can do itself).
No, because the town required a HOA in order to approve plans. It was part of the charter for the community and the town did not want to take on the (admittedly trivial) responsibilities it had outsourced to the HOA.