Historical Overview – HOA’s & CC&R’s
1800 – 1900
1826 – In Boston, Louisburg Square was built as an elegant neighborhood consisting of a centrally located private park surrounded by large, up-scale homes. It was complete in every detail except one – the builder neglected to make arrangements for the maintenance of the private park. In response to the oversight, some of the owners organized themselves into a Committee of Proprietors and undertook the responsibility of maintaining the park. The document they created may well have been the beginning of our modern restrictive covenants.
1869 – A Chicago developer hired Olmsted and Vaux, the designers of New York’s Central Park, to create the exclusive suburb of Riverside. They were the first to circumvent municipal zoning ordinances by writing them into restrictive covenants.
They further expanded the use of restrictive covenants to apply limitations on the rights of homeowners by prohibiting the building of fences and by prohibiting owners from leasing their property.
1900 – Present
The beginning of the twentieth century saw tie emergence of the Community Developers. These developers specialized in constructing entire communities for the very rich. Often these developers would build a small town with its own shopping and business district. This was the beginning of the master planned community.
1906 – Kansas developer J.C. Nichols, created a series of master planned communities called the Country Club District. Nichols used restrictive covenants to provide maintenance of common areas, restrict ownership, control planning and to have some control over the homeowner’s freedom of choice.
For his next project, Mission Hills, Nichols created the "mandatory membership" homeowners association. At that time, deed restrictions were used to sidestep many constitutional and civil laws. Nichols then incorporated Mission Hills, and by doing this, he created a private government with the power to enforce his restrictions, maintain property, build infrastructure, contract for utilities and collect taxes from homeowners for upkeep of the common areas.
Other developers soon followed Nichols lead but throughout the depression and continuing through the war years, housing starts fell off sharply. Today with the housing boom, CID housing has become commonplace but with numerous private corporation governance issues.
