Interesting question,as i have friends in the exact situation you describe..Unfortunately,they are in dire straits..One is in a 20 home subdivision,with 5 built and occupied,3 are partially framed, 3 have foundations and the rest are piles of dirt...None of the occupied homes are adjacent to one another,so they all face 1/2 built homes or construction debris lots...Builder is gone, roads not completed,and they have zero recourse...Not a good situation

Not a good situation indeed.

In my case, the roads, lights, street signs, etc. have already been built. There is also supposed to be a clubhouse and other amenities, but these have not been built yet. What happens in Florida is that the developer takes out a loan (for several million dollars) and the residents have to pay it back over a number of years (CDD fee) in addition to regular property taxes. I do not know what happens if the developer defaults because there is no way that a few people could pay back the millions that would be owed.

This particular community has 430 lots with about 25 homes built over the past three and a half years. Another concern is that to confront the crisis, they are starting to build smaller homes, so we would be one of only a few larger homes in the community.

Talk to a good RE attorney and at least get some idea of what's what.

Unless you signed papers I don't see how the buyers can be forced to pay back what the developer borrowed? But then we have never bought a house in this situation. Read what you sign, and sign nothing until you understand what you are buying.

That's what happened here in the late 80's.
Developer/builder envisioned a 3,000 home subdivision. The economy went belly up and only 300 homes had been sold.
The financing of the total infrastructure was based on 3,000 homeowners paying for it over time. The builders had incorporated these levies as a part of the annual taxes, which were to be paid by the homeowners.
Suddenly, the repayment/escrow of $100 per month in tax assessment became $1,000 per month per homeowner.
Many owners were unable to pay such an increase, and had to walk away from their homes.

I was on telephone divert to my house from the RE office that weekend in 1991, when 60 Minutes reported about these foreclosres on TV. My phone started to ring immediately from all over the country of people wanting to buy a house for $1 (which one owner offered to take his house off his hands).
Obviously most callers had no clue that the mortgage and tax burden came with that $1.

Some laws here have been passed to protect buyers from the same thing happening again and since that time our RE contracts have the following paragraph:

8.4. Special Taxing Districts. SPECIAL TAXING DISTRICTS MAY BE SUBJECT TO GENERAL OBLIGATION INDEBTEDNESS THAT IS PAID BY REVENUES PRODUCED FROM ANNUAL TAX LEVIES ON THE TAXABLE PROPERTY WITHIN SUCH DISTRICTS.

PROPERTY OWNERS IN SUCH DISTRICTS MAY BE PLACED AT RISK FOR INCREASED MILL LEVIES AND EXCESSIVE TAX BURDENS TO SUPPORT THE SERVICING OF SUCH DEBT WHERE CIRCUMSTANCES ARISE RESULTING IN THE INABILITY OF SUCH A DISTRICT TO DISCHARGE SUCH INDEBTEDNESS WITHOUT SUCH AN INCREASE IN MILL LEVIES.

BUYER SHOULD INVESTIGATE THE DEBT FINANCING REQUIREMENTS OF THE AUTHORIZED GENERAL OBLIGATION INDEBTEDNESS OF SUCH DISTRICTS, EXISTING MILL LEVIES OF SUCH DISTRICT SERVICING SUCH INDEBTEDNESS, AND THE POTENTIAL FOR AN INCREASE IN SUCH MILL LEVIES.

"...stuck with a huge tax, community development fee/ liability..."

Here property taxes are based on assessment. If a subdivision wasn't complete it wouldn't increase your taxes. An issue here is roads being complete. Some towns require the road be complete before a single lot is sold, others require the builder to post a bond. HOA fees should be based on the total number of lots, not the number of houses. So, whoever owns the lots not built on (builder, bank, etc.), they are responsible for those fees. We don't have community development fees here, not sure what those are.

Or you can do what we did, buy is an almost complete subdivision where the roads have aleady been converted to town ownership.

My parents are in a similar situation. Beautiful development with open land, community center, swimming pool and fitness center. The developer was covering the costs of upkeep for those facilities, plus the landscaping, snow removal, etc. (it's a low-maintenance development) for those plots/houses that weren't yet sold (HOA dues cover the upkeep of the facilities as well as landscaping).

Now the developer has declared bankruptcy and the HOA is trying to decide what to do - do current owners pay higher dues to cover the costs and keep the facilities open? Do they close the facilities down? Will individual homeowners now be responsible for their own outside upkeep?

It's been very disappointing for my parents. The development they are in is truly wonderful and I'd hate to see them lose the amenities that made them want to buy in the development to begin with.

I am a lurker here but just wanted to add that I remember a while back a new upscale neighborhood was being developed with all custom homes built by local builders and only about 1/3 of the homes were completed and occupied when the developer went bust. He sold the rest of the lots to a national tract builder. The rest of the homes were of a much lesser size and quality.
The owners of the custom homes saw a decrease in the value of their property. They thought about suing but the developer had a clause in the contract that stated he could sell to the remaining lots to whomever he chose.
The developer had not transferred any rights to a HOA at that point.

We have a neighborhood being developed across the street from our land and I worry the same thing will happen as I know the developer is having financial problems and has changed the original plans from very high end homes to much smaller homes on smaller lots.

Right now is a scary time to be buying into an HOA community that isn't built yet, beyond the whole scary concept of HOAs anyway (which I loathe, but personal opinion aside...). It seems that you could be caught with a large unexpected fee should things not go as planned. It wouldn't be so bad if you were one of the last houses built and sold.

Our first home developer went belly up soon after building our home (with street about 50% complete). It was a very small development, literally a single cul-de-sac, with no amenities. Even so, when certain things went wrong with the house, our homeowner's warranty stipulated the developer be contacted for the first year to make repairs. Well, we had a major drainage problem, as in our back yard was under 1 foot of standing water for WEEKS after normal rains. It took a much longer time to get the issue resolved because our developer would not return calls, the landscaping/grading company had not yet been paid, etc. Eventually the warranty kicked in, and we were lucky to have not had any heavy rains to flood the basement or cause major damage. Also the remaining lots were sold and eventually built. But there were problems with the developer going under, not related to HOA crap.