Private Governments

Robert H. Nelson, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland, published a useful article in Sunday's Washington Post outlining the current state of homeowners' associations. Nearly one out of every five Americans is now living under a layer of private government--a share that is growing fast.

Here's the money quote (as we like to say in the blogosphere):

"When historians look back on the last decades of the 20th century, they may well see the associations' rapid spread as a phenomenon with the same social and economic importance as the rise of business corporations at the end of the 19th century. Where Americans of that era collectivized private ownership of industrial property, today we are collectivizing residential property ownership--and literally transforming local government as we go. Traditional individual rights of ownership are giving way to group rights of the whole neighborhood--a sort of paradoxical 'private socialism,' American-style."