At the end of the nineteenth century, Ebenezer Howard envisioned a new kind of city that would, he believed, gradually transform society if enough of them could be built. His vision combined both physical planning and social engineering ideas. When the garden city idea was transplanted to the United States it was put into practice by real estate developers who wished merely to maximize profits and did not share Howard’s utopian social beliefs. Consequently, they emphasized the physical at the expense of the social, paying far more attention to the layout of streets, location of swimming pools and parks, and the color of houses than to the nature of the communities they were creating.
American CIDS (common interest developments) thus took on a bifurcated nature: their physical planning became ever more sophisticated, benefiting from constant study and innovation, but their “constitutions” remained antiquated and in adequate. Residents were expected to run each other’s lives through private governments empowered by a stack of boilerplate deed restrictions, endlessly replicated and unchanged since before the Great Depression.
To offer green open spaces and other facilities while keeping density high, developers created common ownership arrangements. The arrangements required ongoing management and maintenance. Cities and counties expressed no desire to undertake that responsibility, and developers had no interest in subjecting themselves to a greater degree of involvement with government regulation, so residential private government evolved as the standard approach. All these factors make CID housing popular with developers.
This excerpt taken from the book Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. Author, Evan McKenzie
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