# CIVICVS Artifact Entry

## Artifact ID

CAE-OG-2025-HOA-BROKEN-GOVERNANCE

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## Title

Homeowners Associations (HOAs): Pseudo-Governance Without Civic Legitimacy

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## Category

**Organizational Guise (OG)** — Pseudo-Governments

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## Description

Homeowners Associations (HOAs) present themselves as **community governance entities** intended to maintain property values, manage shared spaces, and enhance neighborhood quality of life.

In practice, HOAs often operate as **quasi-governments**:

* Run by untrained, unelected, or underqualified individuals.
* Exercising life-changing powers over residents, including liens, fines, and foreclosures.
* Enforcing restrictive covenants (CC\&Rs) that shape personal property rights, often without due process or meaningful recourse.

This creates a civic misalignment: **governance powers without civic protocols** (elections, transparency, appeals, constitutional safeguards).

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## Source of Truth

* **Bylaws & Covenants (CC\&Rs):** Immutable contracts recorded in property deeds.
* **Board Records:** Meeting minutes, financial statements.
* **Legal Proceedings:** Court filings involving HOA disputes, foreclosures, resident appeals.
* **Tax & Funding Records:** Annual budgets, mandatory dues, fines.

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## Preservation

* Property filings and CC\&Rs are permanent legal artifacts.
* Board minutes and financials should be archived in IPFS or equivalent immutable store.
* Case law involving HOAs is preserved in public judicial records.

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## Analyst Notes

* **Civic Significance:** HOAs embody the risk of *private governance with public consequence*.
* **Civic Risk:** Residents are subject to coercive power without institutional safeguards of civic governance.
* **Civic Value:** Documenting HOAs as pseudo-governments exposes the fragility of civic legitimacy when authority is exercised without training, ethics, or accountability.

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## Civic Consequence

HOAs are a canonical example of **Organizational Guise (OG)**:

* **Claimed Purpose:** Community governance and property value protection.
* **Actual Output:** Arbitrary and sometimes abusive exercises of power over residents.
* **Misalignment:** Life-changing authority wielded by unqualified actors without civic legitimacy.

This exemplar establishes the **Pseudo-Government subtype** within OG. It demonstrates that not all organizational guises are NGOs or nonprofits; some are *private micro-governments* whose civic impact rivals or exceeds that of official bodies.

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✅ **Status:** Artifact Entry filed.
**Subtype Established:** OG-Pseudo-Governments.