As I look at for a new place to live in Pahrump I am specifically avoiding HOA's. We really wanted to live in a nice golf course community there, then we read the CC&Rs and HOA rules. Then I found some meeting minutes from 2018, from Jan to Apr 2018 they issued 400+ HOA violations. Now we are steering clear of there.
bob
That's important research to do. In my Santa Barbara HOA, violations were listed in the monthly update (The HOA was run by a management company but officers were residents). Violations, as in some kind of fine, were extremely rare. The closest we usually got was from vehicle owners paing for their vehicles being towed, and many of those were non-residents. Both the unregistered junkers, and the damn college kids who would come visit their friends in the complex and park in assigned parking, in front of fire hydrants, etc. Everything else was either warnings, or enacting new rules, like locking pool access to only those with complex keycards (and paying out of the HOA funds for the new gates for that). Otherwise, it was always polite warnings about "be kind to your neighbors". Sometimes I wish they would have handed out more violations to the few inconsiderate jackasses.
On the other hand, and I would have never expected this, some of the places I was looking at here in ID before I bought mine, if they were in the 3-5 acre range, often had HOAs. Mostly for stuff like a community well and snowplowing, but one in particular, which I was really interested in, was Draconian. I got hold of the HOA rules and read them, and they had stuff in there like "no generators allowed". This was in a subdivision with large lots mind you, so it's not like your neighbor is "next door". It was also well outside city limits, where you might expect power outages. So that was just weird. That and other rules that you might expect in a condo complex instead of a rural subdivision, put me in the hard "no" category. The HOA fees were only like $100/yr, but the rules were too much.