I coined the word "privatopia" in the late 1980s. The word first appeared in print when I had an article called "Morning in Privatopia" published in the Spring, 1989, issue of Dissent. 

I have been studying the rise of common interest housing since 1985 and have written extensively about it in academic and popular publications.  My book on the subject, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government, was published by Yale University Press and received the Best Book on Urban Politics Award from the American Political Science Association.

When I came up with the word "privatopia," I was looking for a word that reflected the utopian aspects of common interest housing, and when I started thinking about what that utopian idea was all about, it seemed to me that it was privatization. In other words, privatopia is a word to describe a way of life and a housing sector that embodies an attempt to create a better way of life through privatization of the functions of local government. 

Back then, we were in what was called the "Reagan Era," and it was a time when privatization was sweeping through Western Europe and the US, and soon the former Soviet Union nations and all of Eastern Europe became involved in privatizing formerly state-owned assets on a scale that made the US efforts look trivial by comparison.  It seemed that this would go on forever, and many people of a libertarian inclination, who believe in free market economics, believed they had won a decisive battle of economics over politics.

They began to claim that the rise of privatopia amounted to the gradual replacement of municipalities by homeowner and condominium associations.  Soon, they said, cities would be no more.

The famous utopian thinker Ebenezer Howard said something similar over a hundred years ago, but he thought his "Garden Cities" would replace big cities like London.  And many urban politics scholars have become what my friend and colleague Dennis Judd calls "end-time prophets," forever predicting the demise of big cities. 

Yet, somehow local governments have survived, and that libertarian claim of privatopian victory turns out to have been premature.  A lot of things have changed since the late 1980s in the world of common interest housing. They include:

• many municipalities have been requiring that new construction must be in common interest housing developments
•  the "gated communities" phenomenon became widespread in the 1990s, with security measures, or at least the appearance of security measures, becoming big selling points
• the study of this form of housing became international as CIDs began to appear in nations on every continent--China, Australia, France and Great Britain, Russia, Lebanon, Argentina...practically everywhere
• the press becoming more educated about CIDS and the potential for abuse of owners
• the rise of the "Pink Flamingo" movement of CID unit owners fighting for their rights against what they see as oppressive CID boards of directors and their hired professionals, especially lawyers and property managers
• the owner activists have become successful at organizing to influence state legislation in a number of states
• increasingly aggressive state regulation of CIDs, with detailed statutes concerning elections, meetings, opening records to members, architectural review, assessment collection, and many other things, all of which gives owners more rights but makes it harder to be a board member, because there is much more to learn
• the meltdown of the housing market, which has hit condomiums very hard and is also putting HOAs under great pressure--with owners not paying assessments, banks refusing to pay assessments on their REO units, insurance companies and banks tightening up their requirements, and the press accounts of all this making buyers especially wary of CIDS