HOA Detective | January 30, 2026: On February 11, 2026, the Community Associations Institute (CAI) will once again convene a familiar roster of industry insiders for a “Community Conversations Live” event focused on the legislative outlook for community association governance and management in 2026 and beyond. The framing is forward‑looking, the language confident, and the guest list predictably composed of long‑tenured figures drawn from the CAI inner circle.
This moment also coincides with a less celebratory milestone: CAI has now existed for more than half a century. Founded in 1973, the organization emerged during the early expansion of the common‑interest development (CID) model in the United States, positioning itself as the leading trade association for homeowner associations, condominium boards, managers, and affiliated vendors. Over half a century later, the record invites a harder question – what, exactly, has CAI accomplished for the long‑term financial sustainability of American HOAs?
From the cynical vantage point of The HOA Detective™, the answer is deeply troubling. While CAI has been prolific in conferences, credential programs, white papers, and legislative advocacy, it has failed in the two areas that matter most to the survival of common‑interest communities:
- Establishing standardized, regulated, professional management.
- Enforcing rigorous, accountable reserve planning.
2020 and Beyond – The Perfect Storm: The consequences of these failures are now visible across the American housing landscape. The CAI narrative has long been one of optimism. In the early 2000s and again around the 2010s, the organization promoted visions of “HOAs 2020 and Beyond,” promising mature governance models, professionalized management, and resilient communities capable of stewarding billions of dollars in shared infrastructure. Instead, what has emerged is a nation littered with the carcasses of twentieth‑century HOAs – aging condominiums and planned communities now confronting the perfect storm of physical and economic depreciation, and unstable finances.
Most HOAs were never designed to endure indefinitely. Their governing documents, funding models, and reserve assumptions are often designed intentionally or by default to fail in the absence of proactive, persistent stakeholder involvement.
Implicit to such a model is the slow erosion of building systems over thirty to forty years. Recapitalization obligations (reserve funding) have never been articulated honestly to homeowners at inception. Under the first 25 years of CAI’s watch, the concept of reserve planning was virtually and practically ignored. In the last 25 years, the situation has improved marginally at best.
Meanwhile, roofs, plumbing stacks, elevators, façades, parking structures, and life‑safety systems all reach the end of their useful lives on schedules that are brutally indifferent to politics, marketing narratives, wishful thinking, or the personal finances of the 73 million-plus Americans who are vested in some 380K HOAs in the United States.
Yet for decades, CAI has tolerated – and in many cases normalized – a professional ecosystem in which neither community managers nor reserve study preparers are subject to standardized national licensing, rigorous educational pathways, or meaningful regulatory oversight. Unlike real estate brokers, architects, engineers, or CPAs, community association managers in most states require no government‑issued license whatsoever. Reserve planners, whose projections determine whether communities live or die financially, operate in an even more weakly regulated professional space.
Predictable Results: The result, in this regulatory vacuum, has been predictable. Boards staffed by well‑intentioned volunteers rely on managers whose training varies wildly, guided by reserve studies that often emphasize short‑term assessment stability over long‑term solvency. Deferred maintenance accumulates quietly until a triggering event – water intrusion, structural failure, insurance withdrawal, or statutory inspection mandate – forces a reckoning. At that point, the association’s options collapse into some combination of special assessments, emergency loans, and deferred obligations passed forward to future owners.
Not an Imaginary Problem: This is not an abstract problem. In coastal Florida, aging condominium towers now face mandatory milestone inspections and structural integrity reserve requirements that expose decades of underfunding. In the Pacific Northwest and California, mid‑century and late‑twentieth‑century condominium conversions struggle under seismic risk, envelope failures, and ballooning insurance costs. Across the Sunbelt, sprawling planned communities confront infrastructure replacement costs that dwarf original reserve assumptions.
Darkening Storm Clouds: Overlay these structural realities with the ever‑increasing cost of housing in the United States, and the picture darkens further. Homeownership affordability has deteriorated even as HOA fees, special assessments, and debt service climb relentlessly. In many older associations, the monthly carrying cost of ownership is being quietly transformed from equity‑building stability into a quasi‑rent burden where, even after the mortgage is paid off, the burden of supporting the HOA through assessments will never go away.
Against this backdrop, the continued focus by CAI on “legislative outlook” conversations rings hollow. Over fifty years, the organization has successfully advocated for industry‑friendly statutes, protected management firms from stringent regulation, and promoted voluntary credentialing systems in lieu of enforceable standards. What it has not done is insist – forcefully and consistently –
on the two prerequisites of sustainability: standardized, licensed community management and standardized, regulated reserve planning.
A candid assessment leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. CAI has not merely failed to prevent the current crisis; it has helped facilitate it. By prioritizing industry growth, vendor participation, and political access over structural reform, CAI has presided over the normalization of financial fragility as a permanent feature of the HOA model.
Conclusions: The February 11, 2026, CAI event will undoubtedly feature polished presentations, sober warnings, and calls for incremental legislative engagement. But until CAI is willing to confront its own fifty‑year record – and acknowledge that the existing governance model produces debt‑dependent, intergenerationally unjust outcomes – the conversation remains performative. The American HOA landscape is no longer approaching a tipping point. In many markets, it has already crossed it.
The question is not whether reform is needed, but whether the institutions that helped build this system are capable of dismantling and rebuilding it before the next generation inherits the bill.
Because You’re Buying More than a Home!
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