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It depends. Unless membership is optional, I would consider it a lesser value home. Which is ironic given its intended function is to (possibly) keep one asshole from ruining property values, in exchange for a different set of assholes (possibly) destroying value in another way.

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Exactly.

HOAs sound crappy but they're better than living next to assholes/slobs when you have zero recourse. HOA is really the only entity that will care about assholes. The problem with buying a home is that you don't know what your neighbors are like ahead of time.

FYI, some municipalities have democratically driven regulations; this seems like a much better course if you’re not trying to make a homogenous neighborhood.

Depending on the municipality, "democratically driven regulations" are there to make it harder to deal with the asshole neighbor, not less.

The history of government is trying to trade out different sets of assholes. It's a hard problem.

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