> If we all agree to keep to some rules about [...] no inviting of fundamentalist evangelicals into our community, I think that is a net good as well.
I feel like the first people to use this sort of thing would want to say something along the lines of "No Blacks, Jews, or Muslims". If they aren't the first, they will definitely happen. Do you still think this is a net good?
I have to divide this answer into two replies - The Actual World, and The Ideal World.
In the actual world as it is, the people who would say "No Blacks, Jews, or Muslims" are stymied by federal law. Such policies are illegal. Specifically, The Fair Housing Act prohibits this. https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-1
As per my reply to Commexokid below, this post was my argument that HOAs are basically good, and should not be abolished. HOAs are tiny govts with very little power. The Federal govt is a huge govt with all the power. I think people should be allowed to make tiny govts with likeminded people and have a little bit of power to control their surroundings. So, net good.
But my post does say that I want to keep out fundy evangelicals. Which means the federal law I referenced could no longer exist as it currently does, since it prevents discrimination based on religion.
In the Ideal World, as mentioned in the final paragraph of the post, this restriction on freedom of association doesn't exist, but also all the current restrictions on building housing also don't exist. There would be enough housing for everyone. Right now there isn't enough housing, so if certain groups were excluded by such rules, they might not be able to live *anywhere.* In a world with far more housing, people could more easily find a community that they want to live. They would be excluded from some racist neighborhoods, yes. But there would be many non-racist neighborhoods to choose from as well. Or they could choose to live in racist neighborhoods which are exclusively for their race/religion/ethnicity/whatever. If an anti-christian Muslim wants to live in a neighborhood that only allows Muslims, they'd have that option. So, again, in the ideal world net-good.
In the least convenient possible world, where there is both great housing scarcity and also ability to create such discriminatory neighborhoods... I'm less sure. That's basically what we have right now, writ large as nations. Would it be good to forcibly destroy all borders, if one had super alien tech, and force everyone to allow anyone else to move anywhere they want? Maybe. The Open Borders people think so. But I observe that when this happened in colonized countries that had their own tribal borders dissolved and territories consolidated into one large internally-borderless colony, it usually went very poorly. (admittedly this wasn't the only problem in colonized areas, by far)
When this was done in the United States, and formerly segregated cities were forced to take all comers (per the law above), it resulted in a rapid sorting that recreated the original segregation by using money as a proxy for race. Now areas are segregated by how much money one can pour into expensive housing. This has many bad effects, such as forcing people to spend a lot of money on extremely wasteful houses in order to have the neighbors they want. It means people are even more segregated in practice, because those that are different are so far away (physically) that they have practically zero interaction with each other. It may motivate people to try to keep their outgroup too poor to move to the expensive neighborhood and thus makes the economic lives of outgroup-people much worse than they have to be.
This is mostly speculation on my part. But people very obviously want to be segregated, and it's crazy to deny reality showing us this happening over and over. Racism is bad, and one aspect of racism is segregation. But to me this seems analogous to drug abuse. Drug abuse is bad, but the War on Drugs that tried to stop it actually made things far far worse on net for everyone. Racism is bad, but a war on segregation may be net-bad for similar reasons.
Like, is Freedom of Association a good thing or a bad thing, on net? Much like Freedom of Speech, individual parts of it can be bad, but the Freedom is net-good enough to be protected.
So, in short, I guess my answer is that I suspect it would still end up being net-good. Integrated neighborhoods would still exist, where non-racists could live. Having a place for all the racists to concentrate themselves and put them out of our misery actually doesn't seem so terrible? As long as all public sphere places (government buildings, open-to-the-public businesses, etc) remain equal access of course. I have lower confidence than Real World or Ideal World, though.
> the “fix” of making it impossible to have community-imposed restrictions in a community
This post might be aided by some specific examples pointing at the thing that you are complaining about. As it reads now I don’t yet understand what it is you are against in this post.
Sorry, this was at least partially a reflection of sentiment going around in my local circles. Every now and then someone brings up that HOAs should be abolished, and I wanted to have my counter argument for this readily available. :)
> If we all agree to keep to some rules about [...] no inviting of fundamentalist evangelicals into our community, I think that is a net good as well.
I feel like the first people to use this sort of thing would want to say something along the lines of "No Blacks, Jews, or Muslims". If they aren't the first, they will definitely happen. Do you still think this is a net good?
I have to divide this answer into two replies - The Actual World, and The Ideal World.
In the actual world as it is, the people who would say "No Blacks, Jews, or Muslims" are stymied by federal law. Such policies are illegal. Specifically, The Fair Housing Act prohibits this. https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-1
As per my reply to Commexokid below, this post was my argument that HOAs are basically good, and should not be abolished. HOAs are tiny govts with very little power. The Federal govt is a huge govt with all the power. I think people should be allowed to make tiny govts with likeminded people and have a little bit of power to control their surroundings. So, net good.
But my post does say that I want to keep out fundy evangelicals. Which means the federal law I referenced could no longer exist as it currently does, since it prevents discrimination based on religion.
In the Ideal World, as mentioned in the final paragraph of the post, this restriction on freedom of association doesn't exist, but also all the current restrictions on building housing also don't exist. There would be enough housing for everyone. Right now there isn't enough housing, so if certain groups were excluded by such rules, they might not be able to live *anywhere.* In a world with far more housing, people could more easily find a community that they want to live. They would be excluded from some racist neighborhoods, yes. But there would be many non-racist neighborhoods to choose from as well. Or they could choose to live in racist neighborhoods which are exclusively for their race/religion/ethnicity/whatever. If an anti-christian Muslim wants to live in a neighborhood that only allows Muslims, they'd have that option. So, again, in the ideal world net-good.
In the least convenient possible world, where there is both great housing scarcity and also ability to create such discriminatory neighborhoods... I'm less sure. That's basically what we have right now, writ large as nations. Would it be good to forcibly destroy all borders, if one had super alien tech, and force everyone to allow anyone else to move anywhere they want? Maybe. The Open Borders people think so. But I observe that when this happened in colonized countries that had their own tribal borders dissolved and territories consolidated into one large internally-borderless colony, it usually went very poorly. (admittedly this wasn't the only problem in colonized areas, by far)
When this was done in the United States, and formerly segregated cities were forced to take all comers (per the law above), it resulted in a rapid sorting that recreated the original segregation by using money as a proxy for race. Now areas are segregated by how much money one can pour into expensive housing. This has many bad effects, such as forcing people to spend a lot of money on extremely wasteful houses in order to have the neighbors they want. It means people are even more segregated in practice, because those that are different are so far away (physically) that they have practically zero interaction with each other. It may motivate people to try to keep their outgroup too poor to move to the expensive neighborhood and thus makes the economic lives of outgroup-people much worse than they have to be.
This is mostly speculation on my part. But people very obviously want to be segregated, and it's crazy to deny reality showing us this happening over and over. Racism is bad, and one aspect of racism is segregation. But to me this seems analogous to drug abuse. Drug abuse is bad, but the War on Drugs that tried to stop it actually made things far far worse on net for everyone. Racism is bad, but a war on segregation may be net-bad for similar reasons.
Like, is Freedom of Association a good thing or a bad thing, on net? Much like Freedom of Speech, individual parts of it can be bad, but the Freedom is net-good enough to be protected.
So, in short, I guess my answer is that I suspect it would still end up being net-good. Integrated neighborhoods would still exist, where non-racists could live. Having a place for all the racists to concentrate themselves and put them out of our misery actually doesn't seem so terrible? As long as all public sphere places (government buildings, open-to-the-public businesses, etc) remain equal access of course. I have lower confidence than Real World or Ideal World, though.
> the “fix” of making it impossible to have community-imposed restrictions in a community
This post might be aided by some specific examples pointing at the thing that you are complaining about. As it reads now I don’t yet understand what it is you are against in this post.
Also, I wanted to have a baseline for the next thing I'm going to post, which kinda builds off this
Sorry, this was at least partially a reflection of sentiment going around in my local circles. Every now and then someone brings up that HOAs should be abolished, and I wanted to have my counter argument for this readily available. :)
Stuff like this, tho this particular link is old - https://www.petition2congress.com/ctas/dissolve-hoas-nationwide