Comment by bagacrap

As someone who lives in an HOA, the purpose of it is to push responsibilities the city doesn't want to pay for onto us (even though we pay city taxes e.g. property and sales taxes). These include road maintenance and weed abatement. The predictable outcome of forcing a bunch of volunteers to be in charge of this stuff is that the final product is even worse than what the government manages, I.e. everything is constantly falling apart.