THE 'ILLIBERAL' RESIDENTIAL ASSOCIATION Sample Clauses

THE 'ILLIBERAL' RESIDENTIAL ASSOCIATION. Although residential association rules typically focus on maintaining common facilities, common services, architectural standards, and appropriate upkeep by each property owner, these rules may extend far beyond property maintenance to regulate important aspects of both private and public life within the association. Occupancy restrictions may prohibit children [this is now illegal under federal law] or unrelated cohabitants; a right of first refusal may give the board of directors or a majority faction of an association the power to refuse prospective buyers on grounds of financial or social incompatibility. Some associations have attempted to restrict residence to members of a particular spiritual or religious community, and others have enacted rules that control commercial and political speech within their boundaries. The legal mechanisms that create the residential association provide means both to exclude from membership those who would not fit the particular character of the community and to police existing members' adherence to the community's principles. Nonconformists cannot join, and dissenting members face various legal penalties unless they give up their homes and leave the association. It takes little imagination to foresee expanded uses of the residential association. People may wish to build forms of community otherwise impossible in a society dominated by liberal social norms, by multifarious bureaucracies, by large and heterogeneous political subdivisions, and by a distant, representative democracy in which professional politicians wield power. If unrestrained by external regulation, increasing numbers of illiberal political enclaves may arise as people establish concurrent, private governments renouncing the constitutional principles that structure public life and protect private activity in the surrounding community. Although government has regulated association rules both through legislation and through nonstatutory review by courts, current law frequently permits the use of residential association covenants or bylaws to achieve highly intrusive regulation of the members' lives. Federal civil rights law forbids discrimination by private persons in the sale of homes on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and some state civil rights laws also forbid housing discrimination on other grounds, such as marital status. These laws, however, replicate only a portion of the constitutional restraints on public governments a...