I dunno, I live in a neighborhood in LA without an HOA and it's great. Housing values have skyrocketed in the decade I've been here. There are a sprinkling of places that don't take great care of their yards: the bane of every Karen-filled HOA. This has done absolutely nothing to harm property values.

I would wager that the money residents might have paid for HOA fees have largely gone into their own home/yard improvements, and it shows. Adding an HOA in this place, and I think most places, would be a burden rather than a benefit.

To be fair though, the nicest neighborhoods in LA where the price floor is like 2 million are often HOA, old or new. Really the HOA doesn't do too much directly, but selects for the sort of people who don't care about an HOA fee along with the littany of other fees their lifestyle brings them, and that's enough to see home values and associated factors change dramatically from Hancock Park to parts adjacent only a couple hundred feet away.

There's probably a security aspect too with regular private security patrols in HOA areas that do enough to shoo away encampments from setting up. You don't have to look to hard to find encampments off vine north of melrose but you aren't going to find anything like that south of melrose in hancock park, thanks to the spend on private security, given it's the same LAPD in either case.