Berkeley Planning Journal

Over the past 25 years, the creation of 150,000 new common interest communities has made 30,000,000 Americans members of "private governments." The spread of these common interest developments has created a quiet revolution in the structure of neighbor relations, local government, and land-use control. Stephen E. Barton's and Carol Silverman's, Common interest communities: Private governments and the public interest, offers us one of the first books addressing the complex nature of these increasingly widely-used i nstitutions.