HoA is not meant for access to a park. HoA is supposed to be for maintaining public spaces inside a community - a pool, community center, landscaping around common areas, enforce basic rules so people can coexist in tight spaces.
HoA might be pointless if everyone lives on 5 acre lots where the stuff your neighbor does won’t really affect you but if you have homes squeezed into tiny 8k sq ft lots, we absolutely need some basic rules to live together in such close proximity. The rules can just be common sense rules that everyone can agree on but something needs to exist so one person can’t ruin it for everyone else. In a condo, you can’t just blast music during the quiet hours so others can sleep and go to work. In a neighborhood street, you don’t get to permanently park your giant RV and a boat and inconvenience others because you bought too large of an RV to fit in your own lot or are too cheap to pay for storage somewhere else and so now you have decided it to make it be everyone’s problem. This is just common sense which a typical considerate person would follow even without rules on the books but there are always a few that think they can just do whatever they want.
HoA might be pointless if everyone lives on 5 acre lots where the stuff your neighbor does won’t really affect you but if you have homes squeezed into tiny 8k sq ft lots, we absolutely need some basic rules to live together in such close proximity. The rules can just be common sense rules that everyone can agree on but something needs to exist so one person can’t ruin it for everyone else. In a condo, you can’t just blast music during the quiet hours so others can sleep and go to work. In a neighborhood street, you don’t get to permanently park your giant RV and a boat and inconvenience others because you bought too large of an RV to fit in your own lot or are too cheap to pay for storage somewhere else and so now you have decided it to make it be everyone’s problem. This is just common sense which a typical considerate person would follow even without rules on the books but there are always a few that think they can just do whatever they want.