For one, lots of suburban municipalities are not generating enough tax revenue to maintain the infrastructure they already have. Letting a developer and HOA take care of road and storm water infrastructure frees up tax dollars for other uses. It’s a win-win for municipalities.
But owners are paying one way or another, and it's almost certainly going to be more efficient to have administration centralized rather than each subdivision's HOA separately managing a tiny section.
Having the HOA pay for it preserves the illusion of "low taxes". When taxes go up to pay for necessary services, politicians get voted out of office and people vote en masse to lower taxes again; when HOA fees go up, people suck up and pay it.
right, if you must pay either way (and you must), it makes sense to push it off to government, which is more representative (generally) and has larger scale (so should be able to do it cheaper). I suspect local governments tend towards less corruption than HOAs as well (fewer large contracts to a brother-in-law, or at least, a public bidding process so you can see what happened)
That is strong towns's position, but it never checks out - towns have mostly been doing that for decades now.
there is a lot of room for variation in quality of service and towns don't have a way of taxing those who want the town snow service more than those who don't.
Most of the suburbs where I live aren’t old enough to need sewer/storm and street replacement yet. It can take 60+ years for major infrastructure projects to become necessary, I expect to see municipalities fail as the infrastructure burden cripples their budgets.
Suburbs that had the foresight to develop commercial and industrial areas won’t suffer as much, but bedroom communities that aren’t wealthy will suffer once their infrastructure starts aging. There’s a massive deferred maintenance backlog pretty much everywhere.
The first suburbs were built in the 1880s (the streetcar enabled them). They have a long history of adding and replacing infrastructure as needed. It takes 60+ years, but not everything comes due at once and so it isn't a sudden bill all at once, it is spread out over decades. Roads tend to need significant work after 15-20 years.
