The People Behind CAI: The 1973 Founders That Shaped HOA Governance – Part 1

HOA Detective™ | January 20, 2026: As industry observers, we begin each year by scanning the horizon for signs of what the Community Associations Institute (CAI) has planned, especially with respect to legislative action.  This article provides a refresher on the early days of CAI, in advance of next week’s articles, in which The HOA Detective™ will examine the history of “legislative action,” and perhaps more importantly, the long history of INACTION by the organization self-annointed as the policy-making voice of all things associated with common interest real estate developments.

The following is a CAI founder-network profile with an evidence-driven look at institutional incentives and early “revolving door” dynamics. For convenience, all research links and reference citations are found at the end of the article. 

At a Glance

• The CAI was not founded by HOA stakeholders, i.e., the vested homeowners who were destined to shoulder the financial burden of supporting the nation’s common-interest communities, for better or for worse. 
• Rather, the organization was assembled by a developer-government-finance coalition seeking to professionalize and stabilize the fast-growing common-interest community (CIC) model in the early 1970s.
• Several named founders and early leaders were entwined with influential organizations at the time of CAI’s founding on September 20, 1973.
• Among these organizations were the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), Urban Land Institute (ULI), FHA, VA, and HUD, to name the more prominent entities that still exist 53-years later.
• This roster of development industry-leaning planning organizations was seeking to establish strong incentives to normalize private governance of residential housing developments and reduce public-sector friction against the idea.
• A pattern visible from day one: national industry trade groups and quasi-public housing institutions influencing and establishing so-called “best practices” standards before the homeowner constituency (stakeholders) had any meaningful seat at the policy table.

Why the Founders Matter: If CAI is to be evaluated as the industry’s thought leader and policy wonk, it must also be evaluated with its origins and early leadership story in mind. Who convened CAI, what institutions backed the formation, and what those institutions were trying to achieve in 1973 are not academic questions. They explain why CAI has spent 53 years defining the industry’s standards for education, credentials, and governance practices, rather than focusing on stakeholder-protection reforms.

CAI Document Trail: CAI’s own historical narrative places its start in a pre-CAI body of guidance dating to the early 1960s, and in the case of at least one founder, post-war 1940s: 

• The Urban Land Institute’s 1964 Technical Bulletin No. 50, The Homes Association Handbook. CAI describes Byron Hanke as the principal author of the ~400-page “handbook” and identifies him as an eventual founder of CAI.
• 1963-1964: Federal housing and land-planning literature begins formalizing the HOA as a governance vehicle, not merely a neighborhood club.
• 1964: ULI Technical Bulletin No. 50 calls for a national organization to educate and serve as a “clearinghouse” for planned-community practices.
• 1973: CAI forms; early leadership roles are held by David Rhame (chairman) and May Russell (first president), both of whom were well-connected development /home building industry figures in the 1960s and 70s.

Founder and Early-Leader Profiles: Several prominent names appear in the historical records of CAI’s earliest years, including, but not limited to, the following individuals:

1) Byron Hanke (FHA land-planning division; ULI technical author): CAI’s affiliated foundation biography describes Byron Hanke (1911-2000) as a Harvard-trained chief of the FHA land-planning division from 1945 to 1972. It also states he worked with ULI on the survey that culminated in The Homes Association Handbook. 

IMPORTANT – This is not a peripheral detail: The “Hanke FHA connection” positions HOA-style private governance inside the postwar federal housing-policy machine.

2) David Stahl (public official; ULI executive vice president; later NAHB): A publicly available career summary describes David Edward Stahl as a former Chicago deputy mayor and city comptroller, then executive vice president at ULI (1973-1976), and later with NAHB (1977-1984). This cross-institutional linkage is precisely the “revolving door” pattern that tends to harden a consensus: if land-use think tanks, municipal governance, and builder trade groups share personnel, they often share assumptions about policy and philosophical motivations (e.g., a nation where 75% of the new homes are located inside a privatized residential development is a worthy goal for the future.) 

3) David Rhame (developer; chairman role in early CAI): In short, David Rhame could be described as a “heavy hitter” from the residential development/home building ecosystem of the 1960s into the 1980s.  CAI’s “Past Presidents” list names David Rhame as chairman of the board in the 1973-1976 period, and separately marks him as deceased in 2003. A biographical entry identifies him as a land development executive and a CAI founder/chairman in the mid-1970s, with affiliations including NAHB and ULI. 

IMPORTANT – This aligns with CAI’s own internal framing: CAI’s early chairmanship sat at the intersection of developer practice and national trade-group infrastructure.

4) May Russell (community management executive; first CAI president): CAI’s official past-presidents list identifies May Russell as CAI’s first president (1973-1975) and notes she was deceased by 1988. 

IMPORTANT – A CAI blog post similarly describes Russell as a community management executive and early pioneer. In other words, from the start, “professional management” as an external HOA service provider was at the core of the CAI leadership.

5) Lincoln “Linc” Cummings (Whetstone Homes; Montgomery Village Foundation): Secondary accounts (including trade and advocacy write-ups) describe Lincoln Cummings as president of Whetstone Homes Corp. and vice president of the Montgomery Village Foundation in Maryland, and name him as an eventual CAI leader. CAI’s own past-presidents list shows him serving as president (1975-1977).

6) Richard Canavan: In Privatopia (pg. 110), author and scholar Evan McKenzie identifies Richard Canavan as a key example of the FHA–builder trade-group revolving door that pre-dated CAI’s 1973 founding. McKenzie writes that Canavan left his post as the FHA’s assistant commissioner for technical standards in 1966 and returned to the NAHB as staff vice president for the Builder Services Division. 

IMPORTANT – Canavan’s role is not a minor resume detail; it is direct evidence that the federal technical-standards apparatus and the national builder lobby were exchanging senior personnel in the exact window when the modern private-governance housing model was being standardized. Given McKenzie’s acknowledged scholarship on the subject of CIDs, there is no reason to believe Canavan’s role was anything less than what McKenzie describes. 

At a minimum, this description establishes Canavan as a concrete research anchor for the founding-network narrative: a person whose professional identity straddled federal housing standards and the homebuilding industry’s institutional agenda immediately before CAI’s creation. 

Conclusion:  CAI’s founding coalition was structurally inclined to treat HOAs as an asset class, and governance models as policies that should be normalized for the benefit of the core founder group – not as a consumer product requiring hard regulatory constraints, much less policies that should be codified at the state or federal level. 

When the founding table is dominated by developers, lenders, planners, federal officials, and managers, “reform” tends to lean in the direction of the status quo.   CAI’s 53-year history as a policy institution (1973-2026) must be critiqued at this point. Not from the perspective of its founding coalition. Rather, any critical inquiry must examine the evidence, not mythology. The CAI founders were not neutral. They were a highly-educated, highly successful, well-paid, and extremely well-connected group of industry insiders who knew very well that the ecosystem they were seeking to build would change the course of history.  

Next week, we examine the history of missing reforms and CAI’s day of reckoning in a two-part series.

Because You’re Buying More than a Home!

Sources

1. Community Associations Institute, “Our History: CAI Celebrates 50 Years,” accessed January 19, 2026, https://www.caionline.org/about-cai/our-history/. 
2. Community Associations Institute, “Past Presidents,” accessed January 19, 2026, https://www.caionline.org/about-cai/past-presidents/. 
3. Foundation for Community Association Research, “Who is Byron Hanke?” accessed January 19, 2026, https://foundation.caionline.org/scholarships/recent-fellowship-recipients/hanke_bio/. 
4. Urban Land Institute, The Homes Association Handbook: A Guide to the Development and Conservation of Residential Neighborhoods with Common Open Space and Facilities Privately Owned and Maintained by Property-owners Associations Founded on Legal Agreements Running with the Land (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 1964). Public access record via Internet Archive, accessed January 19, 2026, https://archive.org/details/homesassociation0000urba. 
5. New England Real Estate Journal, “Community Associations Institute Celebrates 40 Years,” accessed January 19, 2026, https://nerej.com/community-associations-institute-celebrates-40-years.
6. Prabook, “David Edward Stahl,” accessed January 19, 2026, https://prabook.com/web/david_edward.stahl/1360434. 
7. Community Associations Institute (blog), “International Women’s Day: Celebrating Women in Community Associations,” accessed January 19, 2026,  https://blog.caionline.org/international-womens-day-in-community-associations/. 
8. Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 110.
9. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Federal Housing Administration, Handbook for FHA Employees (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, n.d.), section describing the Assistant Commissioner for Technical Standards, accessed January 19, 2026,  https://www.huduser.gov/portal//portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Handbook-for-FHA-Employees.pdf.