So you are trying to DIY a government but with no prior experience? Sounds like a nightmare.
I often read stories on the internet of how dysfunctional American HOAs are, and nobody ever explains why it's like that. HOAs in most other countries seem to work fine. But it sounds like they have too much power and not enough safeguards for democracy (like a quorum).
Like, there's other contributing causes, but those are the root origins of it all. The US suburban HOA structure started from a mix of communities trying to keep minorities out, and from suburban towns trying to push off infrastructure costs by legally forcing HOAs to provide their own services instead of covering it with taxes.
Combine dysfunctional structural origins and you get a dysfunctional culture around the subject.
US condo HOAs tend to be fairly culturally distinct from the other HOAs since they exist for fundamental and obvious pragmatic reasons (somebody's got to keep the roof repaired), though they also tend to have the same disease of excessive cost-cutting that's like a microcosm of US politics in general (see the Surfside condo collapse for an example).
There are close to half a million of them, if only 1% had some news event yearly, you'd think they all were bad, they're not.
You can list it's the actual negatives, but its not a whatsapp group with no laws.
Heck, even roving bandits in the absence of any government proper are a government of a sort. Just a really bad one.
Very experienced players eventually come to realize most governments eventually devolve to not be much different than non-roving, entrenched bandits. :-)
This is not a reflection on any type of wording of group activities, rather human nature.
Theres so much anarchist writing on this exact topic lmao. It's even the core theme of Le Guin's Dispossessed, with the anarchists replacing a state with an internalised social hierarchy, even while worrying that certain elements of their organisation layer are going to become the government, they rebuild the government.
No anarchist I have ever met has ever thought that one day they turn the government off and thats the end of the job.
Both democracy and anarchy are a belief system based on the assumption that their ideal state is good enough to be self-replicating.
May I introduce you to the concept of Democratic Socialism?
No wonder they're popping up everywhere!
They are in all new developments in most states because the suburb model is financially unsustainable (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 for the argument why), so, if you want to build a nice new development, the town/city is going to say "Who's gonna maintain that little park? Who's gonna cut the grass in the green spaces? Who's gonna sweep the streets?" etc. Not to mention, every amenity outside individual homes (clubhouse, pool, playground) etc. needs to be maintained. Cities can't afford to take them on as public parks, and the individual neighborhoods whose home prices paid for their construction don't really want them to be public either.
And the developer needs to have an entity with which all these responsibilities will vest when they're done building, so, HOA needs to exist.
The alternative is either no shared amenities of any kind, or trying to get the whole city to approve paying for the perpetual maintenance of a new public park when building a new housing tract. Good luck getting that passed, since most existing residents (besides the ones in the next tract over) would say "F that, I'd never go there, why should my taxes pay for it?"
The best amenities? What does that mean, specifically?
> In reality, since suburbs have low crime, the policing is cheap.
Are you sure?
"The average spending on police for jurisdictions with more than one million people was 10 percent in 2017. The average for jurisdictions with fewer than 50,000 people was 13 percent."
- https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
> But somehow the large city next door, with billions in debt and all the jobs (and thus the payroll taxes) has terrible services and terrible schools.
Not sure what that has to do with the sustainability of suburbs.
> I think you just don't like suburbs and will twist your logic into knots to claim a rational reason for it. Truth is, you just don't like suburbs. Most people do, get over it.
That has nothing to do with whether what they are arguing is correct or not.
Old water pipes have been the financial downfall of many suburbs.
Odds are you don't have a lot of heavy fright coming through, so your roads don't need constant replacing. You likely don't have bridges that carry heavy freight, those are a maintenance nightmare.
But once all the buried pipes need replacing, suddenly all the roads need tearing up, and that is expensive.
Is your suburb growing at present? If so, and if your taxes are as low as the typical place, your town is enjoying the fun part of the cycle. Same as Bernie Madoff's customers were happy with their returns for years. When they stop building, it's a matter of time before the city will have to choose between skimping on all the things that make it nice and neglecting roads and pipes, OR, raising taxes.
> the large city next door, with billions in debt and all the jobs (and thus the payroll taxes) has terrible services and terrible schools
That's because most of those cities are run by idiots, elected by the people who vote for all the goodies, borrow whatever it takes, but also don't raise taxes. Almost no cities levy payroll taxes (meaning, taxes non-residents such as commuters from your suburb have to pay) though.
PS: I live in the suburbs, and would never go back to the city. I like it here. That doesn't change the plain fact that under most circumstances, suburbs aren't financially sustainable in the long term.