Depends on who's in charge.
My preference is homes with no HOA, but that's getting harder to find these days, and of course no HOA means your neighbors can be as redneck as they want, and there's nothing you can do to protect your property's value. So it depends on what your priorities are.
The biggest problem with HOAs is that they're run by the people with the time to run them
For me, a big selling point on my condo community was when I saw that everyone had a different fence around their back yard, and different plants in the front. That told me that the HOA wasn't ridiculous with its rules, and that you had some ability to personalize your space. On the other hand, someone else might see that and think that the non-uniformity takes away from our property value.
I lived in one neighborhood in Summerlin (in Las Vegas) that was really cute, but we noticed high turnover in the residents that lived there. Turns out, the HOA was run by a bunch of old people with nothing better to do than drive the neighborhood writing nastygrams to anyone whose lawn was 1/4" too long, oil stains on their driveway, or an ugly truck parked out in front (actually, the nastygram was because there was stuff in the back of the pickup, but I'm sure the real reason was because the truck was ugly and there's nothing they can do to forbid that)
If you come across neighbors when checking out a house, they're a great source of information about the area. Don't just ask them how they like the neighborhood though, because almost everyone will say great. Ask specifics like who are the loud partyers, do the neighborhood kids run around together, are there lots of teenagers around, how's the HOA, etc.