Common-interest development (CID) is the fastest growing form of housing in the world today. They include

condominiums A condominium or condo is a type of living space similar to an apartment. Condominium or condo may also refer to: * Condominium (international law), a political territory * ''Condominium'' (film), a 1980 American TV film **''Condominium'', a nov ...

, community apartments,

planned developments A planned community, planned city, planned town, or planned settlement is any community that was carefully planned from its inception and is typically constructed on previously undeveloped land. This contrasts with settlements that evolve ...

, and stock cooperatives. A CID's ownership benefits are having rights to an undivided interest in common areas and amenities that might prove to be too expensive to be solely owned. For example, an owner would like to have a pool but cannot afford one. When buying a

condominium A condominium (or condo for short) is an ownership structure whereby a building is divided into several units that are each separately owned, surrounded by common areas that are jointly owned. The term can be applied to the building or complex ...

with a pool in a CID of one hundred units, an owner would have use of that pool for basically one-hundredth of the cost due to sharing the cost with the other 99 owners.

Timeshare A timeshare (sometimes called vacation ownership) is a property with a divided form of ownership or use rights. These properties are typically resort condominium units, in which multiple parties hold rights to use the property, and each owner ...

, or vacation ownership, is the same concept. Buying a second home for vacation purposes might not be financially possible; buying a week or two can be when sharing the overall costs with other participants. Within the United States, when a CID is developed, the developer is required to incorporate (in a form) a

homeowner association A homeowner association (or homeowners' association, abbreviated HOA, sometimes referred to as a property owners' association or POA), or a homeowner community, is a private association-like entity often formed either ''ipso jure'' in a building ...

(HOA) prior to any property sales. The role of the HOA is to manage the CID once the control is transferred from the developer. The HOA governs the CID based upon the incorporated covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CC&Rs) which were recorded when the property was subdivided. The CC&Rs will outline the financial

budgeting A budget is a calculation play, usually but not always financial, for a defined period, often one year or a month. A budget may include anticipated sales volumes and revenues, resource quantities including time, costs and expenses, environmen ...

guideline for the HOA in determining the dollar amount in maintenance fees for assessing the owners. In a wholly owned CID, maintenance fees would normally be assessed on a monthly basis.

Growth in the United States

According to the

Community Associations Institute The Community Associations Institute (CAI) is an international trade association and special interest group headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, with more than 60 chapters in the United States that asserts that it provides "education and r ...

, between 22 and 24 percent of the entire U.S. population in 2017 lived in community associations. The two leading states with CIDs are

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, where around 9,327,000 people lived in a CID, and

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

, where about 9,753,000 lived in a Community Interest Development.

Criticisms

In his 2019 Devane Lecture series at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

, Professor Ian Shapiro identified three primary threats to

American democracy The politics of the United States function within a framework of a constitutional federal republic and presidential system, with three distinct branches that share powers. These are: the U.S. Congress which forms the legislative branch, a b ...

posed by the spread of CIDs. Undemocratic Boards: The CID Boards are often undemocratic. HOA board members are selected prior to the construction of the development and are only very rarely elected to their positions. However, in their communities, they take on the responsibilities and functions of

municipal government A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality'' may also mean the go ...

officials. Effects on homelessness: "As seen in Albert O. Hirschman's ''

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty ''Exit, Voice, and Loyalty'' (1970) is a treatise written by Albert O. Hirschman. The work hinges on a conceptual ultimatum that confronts consumers in the face of deteriorating quality of goods: either ''exit'' or ''voice''. The book has been d ...

'', there are problems here about ''entry'', because if all of the housing in parts of the country are built in these developments and can pick he type of consumers they willserve, what about homeless people? Where are homeless people going to wind up? They're going to wind up on the streets of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

or somewhere like that. Because if you want to buy into one of these residences, they don't want you unless they can ensure you can pay. You're going to go through financial screening. You're going to have to prove you can afford to live in the place. People who can't are going to wind up not getting served. If you try to do housing through this type of

market Market is a term used to describe concepts such as: * Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand * Market economy *Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market Geography *Märket, a ...

, there's going to be a

market failure In neoclassical economics, market failure is a situation in which the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto efficient, often leading to a net loss of economic value. Market failures can be viewed as scenarios where indiv ...

that's probably going to be quite costly for governments." Segmented Democracy: "

Douglas W. Rae Douglas Whiting Rae (born 1939) is a political scientist and Richard Ely Professor of Political Science and Management at Yale University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as Chief Administrative Officer of th ...

has an essay titled ''Democratic Liberty and the Tyrannies of Place,'' which points to the fact that we're becoming an increasingly segmented democracy. That is, people tend to spend time around people that are like themselves. Of course, CIDs greatly facilitate that because people will sort by income or go to the ones in Florida, often by

ethnic group An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...

- into these relatively

homogenous Homogeneity and heterogeneity are concepts often used in the sciences and statistics relating to the uniformity of a substance or organism. A material or image that is homogeneous is uniform in composition or character (i.e. color, shape, siz ...

certainly financially homogenous, groups. We know from

Cass R. Sunstein Cass Robert Sunstein (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar known for his studies of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, law and behavioral economics. He is also ''The New York Times'' best-selling author ...

that like-minded people, if they talk to one another, tend to become more

extreme Extreme may refer to: Science and mathematics Mathematics *Extreme point, a point in a convex set which does not lie in any open line segment joining two points in the set *Maxima and minima, extremes on a mathematical function Science *Extremop ...

. So if we get an increasingly segmented democracy of people only hanging around people who look and talk like themselves, this will reinforce a lot of the divisions contributing to the

polarization Polarization or polarisation may refer to: Mathematics *Polarization of an Abelian variety, in the mathematics of complex manifolds *Polarization of an algebraic form, a technique for expressing a homogeneous polynomial in a simpler fashion by ...

of the electorate. This reinforces the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality about people not like themselves."

References

{{reflist Living arrangements Real estate in the United States Condominium