A private community is a residential community that can be an association or a proprietary organization. Associations can include condominiums, homeowner associations or cooperatives.
Whereas governmental communities are financed with taxation, where taxes typically have little connection with benefits, private communities are financed as payments for benefits. In a hotel, for example, the public goods such as elevators and security are paid for from room charges.
One early American example was Lucas Place, laid out in 1851 in St. Louis, Missouri, the first of about 50 such private places unique to the city. Today, there are "60 million people who now live in roughly 300,000 private communities" in the United States.
Famous quotes containing the words private and/or community:
“For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)