Side note to anyone reading this, don’t fucking buy a house with an HOA
Fun fact: lots of city and county governments either mandate or highly encourage HOAs for new subdivision developments. This is mostly because they love abdicating their responsibility to maintain infrastructure for low-density parcels that will never generate enough tax revenue to pay for it, but in some cases could also be for the traditional reason HOAs exist (to facilitate racism and classism).
In other words, most homebuyers will essentially be forced into an HOA simply because most homes are encumbered by them.
What would help is zoning reform to increase density, both so that more housing would be allowed to exist in the places people want it, and so that the infrastructure serving it would be efficient enough for those local governments to remain financially solvent.
But I don’t wanna live in a densely populated area! I wanna live in a predominantly white suburb built on top of a large deforested area with an enormous grass lawn I will never use!
The opposite may help, at least.
A crash in home prices may motivate folks to go door to door to gather the votes needed to dissolve their HOA and raise their property values by the amount that the HOA reduces them.
The reduction isn’t dramatic today, because while everyone hates HOAs few neighborhoods have disovled their HOA.
But it could gain ground rapidly, with the folks in neighborhoods that don’t dissolve their HOAs stuck with properties that sell for substantially less money.