In the very early days you could count the number of private communities with restrictive covenants on the fingers of one hand.  In those days housing consumers had to search a home in a restricted development because that is what they wanted.  But that was then.  Once local municipalities realized they could greatly increase the size of their fiefdoms, increase their tax base without having to provide the services those taxes were designed to pay for, and developers were able to increase density, building more units on less land, the landscape in residential America changed dramatically.  The age of cookie cutter and mini units was born.   Then they multiplied like rabbits.  Everywhere you go and everywhere you look you see the same designs, the same plants, the same colors, the same everything.  On the surface they look boring but take a closer look and you will soon realize that the outer shell is a facade.  The real story of housing American style, takes place behind those beige, bland, plastic walls.

Rodney Gray joins us On The Commons.  Rodney went into acting before enrolling in college where he majored in film.  But it wasn’t until he went to visit his mother in Texas that he was introduced to the concept of Homeowner Associations and witnessed the abuses  that are part and parcel of everyday life in HOAs.  He was informed that the real government could not get involved in protecting the homeowners in his mother’s development because that was a “civil matter”.  But when he was threatened by a real police officer at a homeowner meeting the lines between what was a civil matter and what the real government could do became quite blurred.  And that’s when his passion for making films and his strong sense of moral justice came together.  Going a little beyond what one sees on the surface of HOAs, Rodney put on his investigative reporter’s hat, rounded up some friends and spent several years traveling around interviewing people and filming in HOAs.  The result is his documentary, The HOAX   The HOAX is making the rounds of film festivals and exposing the underside of Privatopia, as Prof. Evan McKenzie calls them.  We’ll talk to Rodney and find out what it took to make the documentary and how the viewers have been reacting to it.