And this is because local governments have offloaded a lot of their responsibilities to HOAs. Some HOAs put up water, electricity, roads, garbage collection and security. Even "public" transport in some cases. Things that used to be the responsibility of the city.

This leads to 2 very undesirable consequences:

1) given that the community of homeowners makes the area livable ... why would they allow public access to their roads? This is almost a complete negative for them.

2) this is effectively an extra tax for the homeowners. Which then also means there can now be very big differences in public services within the same city ... and the city council does not have many options (or justification) to change it.

Frankly this is switching how American cities operate to how it works in third world countries.