CIDs are “Better” than What?
HOA Detective™ | February 7, 2026: It has been many years since I first read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. I’m not a fan of militarism, but the book endures because it is really about incentives, perception, and positioning. Those topics translate cleanly into civilian life –especially when the contest is ideological, the weapons are narratives, and the battlefield is housing policy.
Currently, the Detective is reading Jerry Flemmons’s biography of Amon Carter, Sr, a man who emerged from a barefoot childhood in the dusty streets of late 19th-century Bowie, Texas, to become one of the politically influential and wealthy men of the 20th century. A man who dined with U.S. Presidents in his own dining room in Ft Worth, TX. The Detective has long been a fan of biographies as a useful form of historical research that reminds the current generation of what the thought-leaders from bygone eras were thinking, and that ideas are rarely abstract or entirely original.
Ideas most often become public discourse through the efforts of people, careers, and institutions. One such idea is that of the privately governed, common interest development (CID) housing model, and by logical progression, the “idea” that CIDs, and privatized residential communities, are preferable to the alternatives.
Since the HOA Detective™ and CIDAnalytics have taken on the task of dissecting the early leadership of the Community Associations Institute (CAI), we should treat the founders as historical actors whose incentives can be mapped seriously, not as cartoon villains.
This framing matters because in The Art of War, Sun Tzu’s most famous line – “know the enemy” – is also his most abused.
HOA Detective™ and the HOA Ecosystem: Admittedly, our positioning within the HOA/CID ecosystem is that of an “outsider.” Not that CAI, or individuals like co-founder Lincoln “Linc” Cummings, are “enemies” in the traditional sense. Many, like Cummings, are sincere professionals who believe privately governed CIDs have improved the trajectory of residential development over the last half century, and in so doing are improving the lives of those who choose to live in CIDs in the 21st century.
The Naysayers – Small D Democracy: From the perspective of many CID detractors we are engaged in an ideological struggle between those who treat CIDs as a net social benefit, and those who view CIDs as a privatized governance scheme with structural risks that are routinely hidden from buyers, and in very real ways these organizations are a detriment to society as a whole, and a chink in the armor of “small D” democracy.
The idea for this article was inspired by watching a ProTec “Maintenance Manager” interview hosted by Dave Rauch, featuring Linc Cummings.1 In this conversation, Cummings voices a clear preference for the CID model – arguing, in substance, that it is “better” than the alternative, even if the alternative is left mostly undefined. The missing comparator is the investigative retort:
Better than what? Better for whom, and at what cost?
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War Offers Practical Guidance in this Context: Keep the argument close. “Knowing the enemy is yet another of the tenets of Sun Tzu’s strategy. Read what the founders wrote. Listen to how they tell their origin story. Then compare the incentives they designed to the outcomes homeowners live with today.
What Cummings Built: A short founder narrative attributed to Cummings – circulating online as “Institute Creation” – describes CAI’s formation as an educational response to a rapidly expanding universe of automatic-membership associations.2 This narrative claims that major institutional players (builders, lenders, and planning stakeholders) wanted a “non-partisan, non-profit” environment to educate board members and professionals.2
https://hoadetective.com/the-people-behind-cai-the-1973-founders-that-shaped-hoa-governance/
More revealing is the Governance Architecture Cummings Describes: According to Cummings, CAI was designed as a five-party coalition that included the following groups:
1. Developers – NAHB, NAR largely.
2. Public officials – HUD, FHA, ULI, and VA were prominent in the early years.
3. Community managers – a largely undefined “profession” in 1973.
4. “Industry colleagues” to use Cummings’s words – vendors and professionals); lastly,
5. CID homeowners – the ultimate HOA “end-users” who have been left to pay the bill.
According to Cummings, no policy decision was to be made without agreement across all five groups.2 In public relations language, that is a “legitimacy machine.” If everyone “agrees,” the resulting policies look balanced, moderate, and broadly acceptable. But agreement is not the same as neutrality.
The Five-party Structure with Built-in Asymmetry: Participants from Group 5 – homeowners – rotate in and out, often with limited time and limited institutional memory. Meanwhile, Groups 3 and 4 are permanent, networked, and economically incentivized to stay in the arena. In the 2024 interview with Rauch, Cummings admits that the Group 1 and 2 participants have been distanced from the CAI institutional framework, while this disconnect occurred relatively early in the organization’s history.
In any system where one group is transient and the other is career-long, “group consensus” requires a fluid, or dynamic element. What may well have been a true consensus among the five groups in 1973, when CAI was founded, is not necessarily what a consensus may look like in 2026. Especially when 2 of the 5 original groups are, admittedly, absent from the institutional conversation, and have been for decades.
In the absence of a true consensus, a policy equilibrium becomes a managed output. One that represents the mindset of the current leadership of the group. i.e., that CIDs’ housing is a good thing, housing models that do not include a CID component are bad.
Founder’s Narrative: The same founder narrative contains a second line that should be treated as a pivot, as Cummings posits that over time, managers and other industry “colleagues” (vendors) saw the business potential, became more involved, and “soon took over,” concluding that CAI became “fundamentally a trade association.” 2
The Sun Tzu Question: Better for Whom? This is where the “better than the alternative” claim must be interrogated, not repeated. One plausible answer is that CIDs were designed to be better for the institutional environment that birthed them.
It could be argued that developers benefit because covenants and privately controlled common interest developments preserve marketability and enforce uniform standards after the developer exits.
Lenders benefit because the CID model creates a predictable revenue pipeline to support property values and building upkeep – again, we are arguing at the rhetorical level.
Local governments benefit because CIDs privatize costs that would otherwise appear on public balance sheets: internal roads, stormwater systems, parks and amenities, lighting, and, in some cases, services that would otherwise be provided publicly as a matter of civic obligation.
Meanwhile, the property tax revenues continue to flow into the public treasury, even though CID housing theoretically represents less financial burden to the governments that are funded by property taxes.
Not a Conspiracy Theory. When a founder like Cummings says CID housing is “better,” it can mean “better aligned with the constraints we were managing at the time.” But we are speculating here because “Linc” doesn’t elaborate in his interview with Rauch. Again, the Detective is speculating on a hypothesis here, but it is probably fair to state that the 98 people who died when the Champlain Tower collapsed in 2021 would disagree with the statement that CIDs represent a “better” form of housing.
Group 5 Experience Can be Different: From the view of the homeowner private taxes (assessments) without public-law guardrails, private enforcement covenants (CC&Rs) without democratic transparency norms, and long-horizon infrastructure liabilities (reserves) that are easy to underfund until they are unavoidable are only a few of the discussion points that must be addressed in any objective manner when debating whether CID housing is better than the alternatives.
Over the last 53 years, the CAI agenda has been bereft (to put it mildly) when it comes to addressing the true needs of the most important of the five groups, the 77 million homeowners who now live under a CID regime of one form or another.
Follow the Money and Follow the Outcome: A separate industry veteran’s commentary reproduced on a professional forum captures the same drift in blunt financial terms: CAI evolved from an educational nonprofit posture toward a trade-association model powered by credentials, fees, and vendor commerce – an evolution summarized by the phrase “follow the money.” 3
For CIDAnalytics, incentive drift shows up in predictable places: opaque budgeting formats, credential-driven gatekeeping of “expertise,” vendor bundling, and an ecosystem where homeowners are treated less like constituents and more like customers – often customers who cannot easily leave, and decide to shop across the street.
Keeping Them Close: Keeping the argument close produces three practical insights.
- First, it reveals how CID advocates frame the alternative. The alternative is often implied to be municipal dysfunction: cities that cannot maintain infrastructure, enforce standards, or plan for the long term.
That critique is sometimes fair. But it can also be a rhetorical sleight of hand: it compares the worst version of municipal governance to the best version of association governance.
- Second, it reveals how legitimacy is manufactured. A “multi-stakeholder” consensus process sounds like balance, but balance depends on power symmetry. When one stakeholder class is transient and unpaid while the other is professionalized and profit-seeking, the consensus process will tend to converge on professional priorities over time – even without bad intent.
- Third, it reveals how stewardship is used as the moral defense of CID housing. Preventive maintenance and reserve planning are real virtues, and to his extreme credit, Cummings emphasizes those themes in the ProTec interview framing.1 But stewardship is not a CID-exclusive virtue; it is a governance virtue.
Cities can plan and fund long-term maintenance when public accountability is strong. CIDs can fail catastrophically when transparency and honest funding are missing.
Not Enemies – But Not Neutral: It is also worth acknowledging that Cummings appears to have remained personally invested in the community association world long after CAI’s early era, including philanthropic support for homeowner-leadership recognition through a CAI-affiliated research foundation. 4 This is not the profile of a one-dimensional villain. It is the profile of a true believer.
This is Precisely Why the Philosophy of Sun Tzu applies: True believers are often the most persuasive advocates for a system’s legitimacy. If we are arguing that the CID model is not an unalloyed good – and that it can be structurally harmful as a default housing model – then we need to understand the believer’s framing at its strongest, not at its weakest.
So no, CAI and its founders are not “enemies” in the literal sense. But the CID housing model is not a neutral container. It is a governance technology with winners, losers, and built-in incentives for the most influential members of the group that long ago anointed itself to be the thought leaders of an emerging housing model, which half a century later is the pervasive real estate development model in the world.
Our job, as detractors, is to expose those incentives in plain language, test the “better than the alternative” claim against lived homeowner outcomes, and insist on the protections that real governments are required to provide: transparency, due process, and accountability. That is how you “keep them close,” without personalizing the fight or shadowboxing a caricature.
Notes
1. ProTec Building Services, “The Maintenance Manager: Linc Cummings,” ProTec Blog, November 6, 2024, accessed January 30, 2026.
2. “The CAI Files,” “Linc Cummings, CAI Founder: Institute Creation,” blog post, May 4, 2005, accessed January 30, 2026.
3. Joe West, “The Evolving Role of CAI (2001),” reproduced on Robert Biederman, Condo/HOA Professional Forum, accessed January 30, 2026.
4. Foundation for Community Association Research, “Homeowner Leader of the Year Award,” accessed January 30, 2026.
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