> HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?
Home-owner associations in Europe are frequently set up for apartment buildings, in which case, yes, the roof, foundation, hallways, stairwells, main piping, electricity, etc are all legally co-owned.
Primary purpose of HOAs is to save for & plan long-term maintenance on the entire building.
HOAs for neighbourhoods, or blocks with single-family homes or terraced houses are pretty rare in Europe.
What will hit you before that here in Switzerland is the local authorities which have in front of their eyes a certain plan for your building, and anything not on the plan (in this case the AC unit) will need a permit. It's not an easy task, I would say impossible actually, to get such a permit, unless you find a way to redesign the whole facade in a acceptable way (units poking out doesn't count as acceptable).
Multi-logement buildings are not really the issue here. In the US (and outside, but less commonly, but e.g. France has them in the Alps, for the same reason) there are communities with only freestanding houses that privately own the infrastructure serving a number of houses, if I may be blunt: to make things cheaper for local councils and get housing approved, everything from roads to sewer lines.
They force homeowners to decide together (and pay for) everything from road maintenance to what noise levels are allowed.
Another issue they cause is that, of course, the homeowners living there do not just use HOAs to override the wishes of individuals, but also feel disinclined to let the local authorities ... and the locals ... operate as normal there, given that they pay for everything, sometimes literally including the roads in the area around them. These communities may have banks, parks, even beaches, and there are conflicts about who gets to go there, given the local homeowners pay for maintenance. For example, given they clean up left-behind garbage, do people from the nearby town get to play there ... and leave behind more garbage?
The root of the problem is that more housing is no longer a net positive for many communities in a great many places. The increase in taxation income does not justify the extra infrastructure in many places. This means local authorities refuse building projects unless they pay for their own infrastructure. Hence, HOAs are being forced to take over the functions that public authorities used to have ... because local authorities are forcing the responsibilities that local authorities used to have on them. Of course, then the public nature of public space goes into question.
> The root of the problem is that more housing is no longer a net positive for many communities in a great many places. The increase in taxation income does not justify the extra infrastructure in many places. This means local authorities refuse building projects unless they pay for their own infrastructure.
So a municipality can just refuse to build infrastructure?
That's just the "fuck you, got mine" mentality that permeates the living experience of US citizens. That's how they got their healthcare system as well.
> So a municipality can just refuse to build infrastructure?
Technically they're refusing to let people build unless they pay for (and arrange for) infrastructure. They will certainly claim that this is in fact building infrastructure.
> That's just the "fuck you, got mine" mentality ...
HOAs are companies, with the owners as shareholders, who own the shared infrastructure of the owners. Things like hallways, maybe elevators, gardens, this can even include the roads in a community.
The point of HOAs is to force homeowners to CO-decide (in houses: to make things cheaper for local councils) on what happens to the shared infrastructure. What and how to spend of maintenance and what to change.
HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?
Anyway HOA is something that shouldn't even exist. Or at least not with power to prevent people from having air conditioning in their home.