In practice, HOAs generally don't do anything useful, though.
How?
There are a couple examples in the comments, of HOAs awarding no-bid, single-source contracts to cronies or family. Are you sure that a government-par bid process is universally, legally required for HOAs contracting out with contractors?
> If someone doesn’t like how the HOA is run then they can always try to run against the current Board members running for re election.
There are also several examples in the comments, of dreadful HOAs which retain power for reasons other than residents simply wanting it. Applied to the crony contracting described above, I don't think that most residents, if polled, would say that they want that, yet the examples still happened. That seems to indicate that your remedy was inadequate to effect the will of the people. So my question to you is:
If, say, people don't want their HOA corruptly accepting inflated charges in no-bid contracts with friends and family, using HOA money, how is it that in some cases, their HOA did so? Those are the failure points in representation which need addressing.
Yes, per Fl Statute 720 any quotes/bids for contracts exceeding 10% of the budget requires competitive bids but doesn’t set a number like 3. Two is practical minimum.
But competitive bids for attorneys, architects, CPAs, community association managers, or sole source vendors where there is only one in the area that does the work etc are not required. Like say a business that is the only one in the area that does aquatic maintenance on ponds.
Anything else in here is just anecdotal
My house, though, is not common property. Let the HOA rules cover only the common stuff.
Incidentally, local government where I live provides tennis courts, basketball courts, swimming pools and plenty of playgrounds. A few of these are within walking distance...
If it had a convenience store nearby, it would be like a little village
I get that there's a certain type of person who'd like this, but for the majority of people, you're highlighting the reason people don't like HOAs. You're creating a little city, whereas most people just want a home.
In any case, as I may have said somewhere - if you exclude condos, only a small percentage of HOAs have any shared facilities. No courts, no clubhouse, no pool, etc. When I was house hunting, easily under 10% of HOAs had any shared area.
Feels really odd, no one in our area actually wants an HOA. Yet i think people are going to flip when their HOA dues are suddenly required by the city and at much steeper rates (i imagine 2-4x the cost, our dues are quite small atm).
The real, completely arbitrary thing that makes housing expensive is zoning. There is research on this. Zoning, especially in the long term, has enormous effects, including on things seemingly unrelated such as reducing construction productivity, reducing competition among construction firms (fewer contractors) and reducing housing supply (supply vs demand).
I think people generally don’t appreciate how restrictive zoning effectively is. It’s not just what you can build, but how big it is, layout things, and can even reach into aesthetics etc.