I may be the outlier here but our HOA is pretty good now. I think it all depends on the board and the company they hire; ours was awful before we switched management company's. We live in a community of about half single family homes and half townhomes. We have separate HOAs but because the pool and recreation building are shared, we pay a bit to the "Master HOA". We bought a townhome almost three years ago - the HOA takes care of the yard and is responsible for the roof and exterior walls. The original management company was horrible - zero response to communication and zero answers when they attended meetings. Finally our board had had enough and we switched companies. Now our stuff gets taken care of quickly, they are super responsive to communication and our fees actually went down ($12 a month, but hey - every bit helps!). Our board is pretty good now too, but as with anything, it's hard to get people to come to meetings, so they get what they get. The Masters still do stupid things, like placing No Parking signs on city streets to attempt to cut down on street parking (we had an energetic conversation about that during our last meeting and, poof! All the signs went away) but all-in-all we're pretty satisfied. And they did put a new roof on our house last year, so that's a $25000 saving right there!