Abstract Summary/Description
Homeowners associations (HOAs) are key players in local urban governance regimes, especially in metropolitan areas with substantial construction of new housing. Membership in these organizations is mandatory with the purchase of a unit in a planned development (in any variety of single-family housing, townhouses, and condominiums) and they have powers to substitute for public service delivery (garbage collection, security, amenities, etc.) as well as regulate personal property usage for their members. Although fundamental research on HOAs has examined their impact on localized democracy, the homogenization of residential living by socioeconomic status and race, and their effect on property values, no work has investigated HOAs' important interaction with private management companies with which they often contract out day-to-day responsibilities. Using data obtained via a public records request from the Nevada Department of Business & Industry's Real Estate Division and a networks approach, this project depicts the changing HOA-management landscape in the state over the last nearly ten years. To my knowledge, this is the first use of network visualization under the HOA context. I investigate the increasing dominance of a handful of management companies, in addition to the growth of HOAs in general and their geographic concentration. I also outline next steps in this developing research project, which will be the basis for a dissertation chapter. This work has implications for local and state policymakers seeking to regulate HOAs and better understand the ways in which they exercise exclusionary legal and financial power through third party actors, notably in the booming Sunbelt region.
