About 78 million Americans live in a community association. Sixty-five percent of homes completed last year were in one. It feels like a permanent feature of American life, like the interstate. It is actually a specific invention by a specific man who wrote down exactly what he was doing and why, and you can still read it.
Llewellyn Park, in West Orange, New Jersey, was founded in 1853 and had a fifty-acre shared common called The Ramble. Its proprietors held their first annual meeting on January 1, 1858, and they have never stopped. That is governance by property owners over shared land, a hundred and sixty-eight years ago.
Riverside, Illinois followed in 1869, and Roland Park in Baltimore in 1891, with deed restrictions requiring a minimum house cost of $3,000, thirty-foot setbacks, and maintenance fees.
You will often read that Roland Park created the first homeowners association in 1891. That is not quite right. Its Civic League was organized in 1895, and the entity that actually collected mandatory assessments — the Roland Park Roads and Maintenance Corporation — was not established until 1909. Roland Park is best described as the most influential early model, not the first. There is a lovely detail, though: the maintenance fee there is reportedly still the same amount it was a century ago.
The modern HOA comes from J.C. Nichols and the Country Club District in Kansas City, begun in 1908. What makes this more than a guess is that Nichols explained the design himself, in a talk preserved in his papers.
He claimed the district “was probably the first district in the United States where self-perpetuating restrictions were used.” Here is the mechanism, and it is elegant and slightly diabolical:
The restrictions automatically extend themselves unless owners of a majority of the front feet execute and record a change before expiration. Nichols was explicit about why he built it that way — because “if its character is to be changed, the affirmative vote of those wishing the change is required.”
Read that again. Under the ordinary rule, a restriction expires unless people act to keep it. Nichols inverted it: the restriction survives unless people act to kill it. Apathy becomes a vote for the status quo, permanently.
Then he added the enforcement body: the district divided into sections, “each under a separate home association having five directors,” about 500 families each, funded by mandatory assessments covering “all community matters not provided by the municipality” — trash, snow plowing, and enforcing the restrictions.
And it spread because Nichols was not just a builder. He was a founder of the Urban Land Institute, chaired its Community Builders' Council, and chaired the national real estate board's Home Builders and Subdividers Division. He taught the industry. His model turns up in Beverly Hills, in Westwood, and — close to home — in River Oaks in Houston, whose developers studied the Country Club District directly. Highland Park in Dallas was platted a year earlier, in 1907, and came out of the same design world rather than from Nichols — Wilbur Cook, who laid out Beverly Hills, laid out Highland Park too.
His developments also carried recorded covenants barring Black families from owning or occupying the homes, and his sales offices excluded Jewish buyers as a matter of policy. Both things are true about the same man and the same product.
The scale version arrived in 1947, on Long Island. Levittown, New York — there is a separate Levittown in Pennsylvania with its own history — where Levitt & Sons broke construction into 26 separate steps, each performed by a specialized crew moving house to house — an assembly line where the product stood still and the workers moved. Peak output reached 36 houses a day. They built 17,447 homes between 1947 and 1951.
The vertical integration was extraordinary: their own lumber supply company with a half-mile rail facility, pre-cut lumber, pre-assembled plumbing trees and stairs, their own cement trucks and cinder block. When materials ran short, Levitt chartered a boat for European cement and bought a forest in California.
The house sold for $7,990 — about 800 square feet, $100 down, $56 a month — which was possible only because FHA and VA lending had replaced the prewar standard of a three-to-five-year loan at 60 to 70 percent of value.
One honest caveat: the claim that mass production made Levitt's houses dramatically cheaper is contested. Competitors were selling comparable houses at roughly the same cost per square foot, and the economies of scale appear to have flattened out well below Levitt's volume. The revolution was in speed, not necessarily in price.
This history has a side that gets either skipped or flattened, and the precise version matters because the details are still sitting in deeds today.
Levittown's lease and deed clause read:
“The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race, but the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”
The second half is the part I cannot get past. The clause excluded non-white people from living there — unless they were working there. The exclusion was never about proximity.
In 1953 Levittown's population was about 70,000, with no Black residents. The 1960 census counted 57 Black residents out of 82,000.
1926 — Corrigan v. Buckley. Thirty white property owners in Washington, D.C. had recorded an indenture covering twenty-five parcels barring sale or occupancy by “any person of the negro race or blood” for twenty-one years. The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal for want of jurisdiction, reciting along the way that the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibitions have reference to state action “and not to any action of private individuals.” Technically a jurisdictional dismissal. Universally read as a green light. Covenant use exploded.
1948 — Shelley v. Kraemer. Everyone remembers this as the case that ended racial covenants. It did not. Here is the Court's own sentence:
“We conclude, therefore, that the restrictive agreements standing alone cannot be regarded as violative of any rights guaranteed to petitioners by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
What Shelley held was narrower: a court enforcing such a covenant is state action, and the state may not lend its coercive power to racial exclusion. The covenants remained perfectly legal to write. They were simply unenforceable in court.
Texas Property Code §5.026 declares discriminatory provisions void, and §5.0261 — created by SB 30 in 2021, authored by Senator Royce West of Dallas — gives you a way to get it out of your records.
It is far simpler and cheaper than what came before, but be clear about what it is: a court filing, not a form, and how fast it actually moves depends on the court. Texas Law Help publishes the paperwork, and a legal aid organization can walk you through it. If you find that language in your title work — and in older DFW neighborhoods you may — you can do something about it.
| Year | Associations | Residents |
|---|---|---|
| 1970 | 10,000 | 2.1 million |
| 1980 | 36,000 | 9.6 million |
| 1990 | 130,000 | 29.6 million |
| 2000 | 222,500 | 45.2 million |
| 2010 | 311,600 | 62.0 million |
| 2024 | 369,000 | 77.1 million |
From about 500 associations nationally in 1962 to roughly 373,000 today, collecting $124.2 billion a year in assessments.
You will see it claimed that more than a third of U.S. housing is in an HOA. That figure does not square with the same organization's own unit count — 29.6 million units against a housing stock of roughly 147 million is about one in five. I have used the resident count, which is solid.
Two reasons, and neither is that buyers demanded them.
The federal government promoted them. In the 1940s the Urban Land Institute endorsed developer-created homeowner associations, and the FHA was pushing deed restrictions in community development with associations as the long-term enforcement mechanism. Between 1963 and 1973 the FHA and ULI worked together to spread community associations through planned unit developments.
And cities worked out that it was cheaper. Research by Cheung and Meltzer found that tracts in cities that spend more on public services are less likely to get HOAs — a thousand-dollar increase in per-capita city spending cut the likelihood of an HOA forming by about 20 percent. Public services and HOA services are substitutes.
This surprises people and it should not be buried. Under Texas law a property owners association can foreclose an assessment lien. There are real protections, and they are newer than you would think.
One important limit on all of the above: Chapter 209 governs subdivision property owners associations. Condominiums run on Chapter 82, which has a different set of rules including on foreclosure. If you are buying a condo, ask specifically about Chapter 82.
Texas Property Code §207.003 entitles an owner or buyer to demand the current restrictions, bylaws, rules and a resale certificate, delivered no later than the 10th business day after a written request — and if the association misses that deadline, it cannot charge a fee.
The certificate has to disclose, among other things: regular and special assessments, all unpaid amounts owed on the property, capital expenditures and reserves, the current budget and balance sheet, unsatisfied judgments, pending lawsuits involving the association, known violations on the property, transfer fees — and whether the restrictions allow foreclosure of a lien for unpaid assessments.
Texas law requires the association to tell you, in writing, whether it can take your house for unpaid dues. It is on the form. Almost nobody reads that page. Read that page.
None of which is an argument against buying in an HOA. Most of the housing being built is in one, and a well-run association protects the thing you are buying. It is an argument for knowing that what you are joining is a private government with a lien on your house, invented by a Kansas City developer who designed it, in his own words, to outlive his company.
The modern HOA traces most directly to J.C. Nichols and the Country Club District in Kansas City, begun in 1908. In his own archival account Nichols said it was probably the first district in the United States to use self-perpetuating restrictions - rules that automatically extend themselves unless owners of a majority of the front feet act to change them, deliberately inverting the usual burden. He paired that with sectional homes associations of about 500 families each, funded by mandatory assessments, designed so enforcement would continue 'beyond the life of our company.' Earlier examples exist: Llewellyn Park, New Jersey held proprietors' meetings from 1858, and Roland Park in Baltimore established its Roads and Maintenance Corporation in 1909, not 1891 as is often claimed. Nichols spread the model nationally through the Urban Land Institute, including to River Oaks in Houston. His developments also carried recorded covenants barring Black families from owning or occupying the homes.
No, and this is the most commonly misstated point in the history. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) the Supreme Court held that judicial enforcement of a racially restrictive covenant is state action barred by the Fourteenth Amendment - but the opinion says directly that the restrictive agreements standing alone cannot be regarded as violating any rights guaranteed by that amendment. The covenants stayed legal to write; they just could not be enforced in court. Real estate professionals continued including them in new deeds afterward, warning that leaving them out would put a cloud on the title, and a damages workaround was only closed by Barrows v. Jackson in 1953. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 finally made them illegal, and even then the language kept appearing - which is why it is still physically present in millions of deeds.
Texas Property Code section 5.026 declares discriminatory provisions void, and section 5.0261, created by SB 30 in 2021, provides the removal process. A property owner files a verified motion with an affidavit with the district clerk in the county where the instrument is recorded. The court may rule solely on a review of the conveyance instrument without hearing testimony and may proceed without delay, and if the court does not rule within 15 days the motion is deemed granted. No filing fee may be charged by the court clerk and no recording fee by the county clerk. The original document is not destroyed; the court's findings are recorded alongside it. Before 2021 Texas had no statewide process for removing this language from property records. Confirm current procedure with the district clerk or a legal aid organization.
Yes, for unpaid assessments, but with meaningful limits that are newer than most people assume. Section 209.0092 of the Texas Property Code, added in 2011, requires an association to first obtain a court order through expedited foreclosure before any non-judicial sale. Section 209.009 prohibits foreclosure where the debt consists solely of fines, or attorney's fees associated solely with fines. Section 209.0094 requires a first notice by mail or email and a second by certified mail at least 30 days later, with the lien filed only 90 days after that second notice. Section 209.011 gives the owner a right of redemption for 180 days after the association mails notice of the sale. Owners also have rights to notice and a board hearing under sections 209.006 and 209.007 and to inspect records under 209.005. Two limits worth knowing: section 209.0092 has statutory exceptions including a written waiver by the owner, and Chapter 209 governs subdivision associations while condominiums run on Chapter 82 with different rules. Confirm specifics with a real estate attorney.
Under Texas Property Code section 207.003, an owner or buyer may demand the current restrictions, bylaws and rules plus a resale certificate, which the association must deliver no later than the 10th business day after a written request - and if it misses that deadline it cannot charge a fee. The certificate must disclose the frequency and amount of regular assessments, approved special assessments, all unpaid amounts owed to the association, approved capital expenditures and reserves, the current operating budget and balance sheet, unsatisfied judgments against the association, pending lawsuits involving the association, insurance for common areas, known violations on the property, transfer fees, and whether the restrictions allow foreclosure of a lien for unpaid assessments. Read the financial pages and the foreclosure line, not just the rules.
Roughly 78 million people, in about 373,000 community associations as of 2025, according to the Foundation for Community Association Research. That is up from about 10,000 associations and 2.1 million residents in 1970. Associations collect roughly $124.2 billion a year in assessments, and about 66 percent of newly completed homes were in one. Be careful with the widely repeated claim that more than a third of U.S. housing is in an HOA - it does not square with the same organization's own count of 29.6 million units against a national housing stock of roughly 147 million, which is closer to one in five.
Buying in an HOA neighborhood? Send me the resale certificate and the restrictions during your option period and I will read them properly — the financials and pending litigation, not just the paint colors. That document tells you more about what living there is like than the listing ever will.
Send me the HOA documentsChecked September 2026. Where sources disagree I have said so in the text rather than quietly picking one. Laws, rates and standards change — verify anything you are relying on with the relevant agency or a licensed professional.
REALTOR® · BHHS PenFed Realty Texas
I help buyers and sellers across the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex — Fort Worth, Burleson, Crowley and Keller, and the surrounding Dallas area. I write these because they are the questions I answer on the phone every week, and most people never get a straight answer to them. If you have one I have not covered, ask me — I will probably turn it into the next post.