Best explanation that I have heard is that this is a scheme to empty crappy neighborhoods that are in desirable locations then they can grab the land for their developer donors.
Not at all. We have a 20-year-old HOA community with the new construction: ie. Tyvek and energy-saving windows, doors and appliances under brick fronts and vinyl siding, with buried phone/cable/fiber lines. There are common areas, sidewalks, and the whole neighborhood backs onto a wooded state park. It was paradise when we moved here. There were homeowners of every race and religion here, roughly in the same proportion as the national demographic, all of whom could afford to live here, pay the community dues and keep their property up.
But during the Obama recession of 2009-10, owners who had to move for employment reasons, for instance, couldn't sell readily and the unpaid volunteer HOA Board voted to allow houses to be rented. Within months, the entire 130-home community started getting seeded with ghetto Section 8 renters, and now it is every four to six houses.
Now we have broken glass, loud parties late into the night when others have to get up for work the next day, thumper cars, speeding on the straightaways and around the corners regardless of children playing, thefts of yard and garden equipment and unbagged trash floating hither and yon. Participation in the HOA board meetings has stopped. The pool rules have had to become draconian. Those of us who pay the community dues without government assistance have seen them nearly quadruple, for fewer services, because now we have to pay for a mostly useless night security vehicle and someone to pick up dog waste, because the renters don't bother. They also defend their children trespassing on other's decks and yards, because they do not understand the whole concept of ownership. If you say no to them, angry moms come roaring out to lay the race card against you.
My lifetime housing investment (I am now retired) has already lost at least 30% of its market value, but taxes, too, have gone up. The black professionals who moved here initially to raise their kids in safety now are faced with guns and drugs in the schools and their children lumped in by skin color with the Section 8 fatherless children.
I shudder to think what our helpful socialist government will do next. And I am at a loss as to where to go that won't be forced to become just like here.