I looked at the rules before I moved to my current home and still keep an eye on proposed modifications since. Having lived and worked in the country's largest city with no zoning laws, I've seen the results when HOA's are weak and ineffective.
Yep. In Houston, with no zoning laws, pretty much any decent neighborhood needs to have an HOA with a fair amount of deed restrictions. If it wants to remain a nice, quiet and safe neighborhood, anyway.
When we lived in Houston, my wife was on the HOA board for a while. Our HOA was actually somewhat weak, and that was by design and intent. Then again, it was a largely upper middle class development, and for the most part they didn't *need* a strong HOA since the vast majority of residents were "low maintenance" about keeping their homes respectably groomed, painted and quiet. Probably 95% of them did that on their own because they valued the quality of the neighborhood and for keeping up their property values.
At one point the association wanted to clarify some deed restrictions. Some of them were obsolete and needed to be deleted, and others needed to be updated to reflect the 35 years of progress and technology that had past since the original deed restrictions were passed. (There were also some areas where the restrictions were going to be *loosened*.)
Well, some folks (the usual strong anti-authority types) got up in arms almost before they read any of it, and started a smear campaign on the board. They started up web sites, looked for any dirt they could find on any member of the board, tried to turn every board action into a scandal, tried to make their lives hell as long as the deed restriction updates were in play.
For what? To torment people who accepted a position which (as events would prove wise for those who declined to serve) did little more than make you a target for getting slimed and for having your integrity questioned? In a position that paid exactly *zero* and where, unlike Congress, the HOA board had to live under the exact same "laws" they proposed as everyone else. (And keep in mind that it required a 2/3 approval of all the homeowners, not just board approval. So in reality, the work of 9 people meant almost nothing if 2/3 of over 900 homeowners didn't agree with it.)
So sometimes HOAs are a pain in the you-know-what. But in reality, some of the knee-jerk, anti-authority "activists" are three times the PITA that a reasonable HOA could ever aspire to be.