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 such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate, so that being thrown into the balance it may prevent either scale from preponderating.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)