Should the 14th Amendment protections apply to homeowners associations?

These problems and issues with CIDs have existed from their very inception with the publication of the ULI Homes Association Handbook, Technical Bulletin #50, in 1966 and will continue for the next 40 years unless the mental set and attitude toward planned communities undergo a major paradigm shift.

The inescapable conclusion to which the Commission will inevitably be drawn, if our Constitution is to remain meaningful and “that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth” and be replaced by the increasing number of private governments, is for CIDs to be subject to the same municipality laws of the state to which all other local government entities are subject. There will again be only one rule of law for everyone.

The following areas must be addressed:

1. Is it proper for the state to create, permit, encourage, support or defend a form of local government of a community of people, whether that form of government is established as a municipal corporation or as a private organization that is not compatible with our American system of government?

2. Is it proper for the state to permit the existence of private quasi-governments with contractual “constitutions” that regulate and control the behavior of citizens
a. without the same due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that
b. do not conform to the state’s municipal charter or incorporation requirements, or that
c. do not provide for the same compliance with the state’s constitution, statutes or administrative code as required by public local government entities?

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Excerpts from March 14, 2005 Citizen letter to California Law Review Commission Memorandum 2005-3 on homeowner bill of rights. The complete letter may be found at Rights.

California CLRC proposal for state assistance to HOAs

CALIFORNIA LAW REVISION COMMISSION STAFF MEMORANDUM
Study H-853 March 2, 2005
Memorandum 2005-10
State Assistance to Common Interest Developments
(Staff Draft Recommendation)

See p. 66 for my letter to the Commmission.
CLRC

My second paragraph reads:

"To state my concerns concisely: Any statute, law, agency rule or regulation not accompanied by an enforcement process or procedure is not a statute, law rule or regulation. It’s an empty statement of policy, relying on the goodwill and citizenship of the people to whom it applies. And when in the course of human events, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing inevitably the same object, evinces a design to reduce homeowners under an undemocratic, despotic form of corporate government over their homes, their private properties and their lives and the lives of their loved ones, restricting the liberties and freedoms given to and enjoyed by other persons not living in a CID, then it’s for the government to provide the necessary oversight and to exercise its rightful and proper police powers to regulate the abusers, and to restore to homeowners in living in CIDs the same rights and privileges enjoyed by all other persons in the state. It is only fitting for the legislature to enact such proposed legislation."