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Communal housing projects in the USA (also known as community interest developments and common interest communities) in which the property is held in common, residents must be members of the Homeowners\' Association, and that Association\'s constitution governs a wide range of aspects of land and property use. The Association usually provides and manages open spaces, including gardens, parking facilities and garbage removal; more than half provide a swimming pool and a meeting place. Association regulations on behaviour within their territories — which extend to such issues as the minimum age for a resident, the size of dogs which may be kept, and even whether kissing in cars parked on the street is permissible — in effect mean that they operate as \'private governments\' separate from the state apparatus, although decisions have been challenged through the court systems.
The original pids were associated with condominium developments but the form of governance has spread rapidly in recent years, involving a wide range of developments, comprising detached housing as well as townhouses and apartments. There were less than 500 registered Homeowners\' Associations in 1964 but 150,000 by 1992, with the latter covering 32 million residents and over 11 per cent of all housing in the USA: the main concentrations are in California (20,000 Associations in 1992) and Florida (15,000). Associations are governed by elected Boards of about five members, so that in California alone some 100,000 people are involved in the governance of these separate communities.
Most pid residents are relatively affluent, for whom the Associations are, in effect, \'independently-policed ghettoes\' — a further example of the use of territoriality strategies in the spatial structuring of social life. (Knox, 1994, termed pids \'an ideology of hostile privatisation … [creating] a caste society with utter social separation of the rich\'; Harvey, 1996, called them a \'form of contracted fascism\'.) (RJJ)
References and Suggested Reading Barton, S.E. and Silverman, C.J., eds, 1994: Common interest communities: private governments and the public interest. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Local Government Studies, University of California. Harvey, D. 1996: Cities or urbanization? City 1-2: 38-61. Knox, P.L. 1994: The stealthy tyranny of community spaces. Environment and Planning A 26: 170-3. McKenzie, E. 1994: Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the rise of residential private government. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. |
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