Ha, did exactly the same thing, since I noticed nearly no bees or other insects last year. I dedictated around 200 m² of my lawn to nature. I think it helped: This year, there where so much more of them to see.
FTFY.
And, of course, single-family home lawns in any densely populated area are likely to be regulated, many of which aren't high income. I can't get numbers on how many of those ~70% of Americans are under town restrictions, but it's not a trivial number.
So no, it's not just HN's demographics. This is genuinely widespread in the US; I'd estimate that at least 100,000,000 Americans live under some form of these restrictions.
https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/S...
http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-a...
A suburb of Portlad OR is far more likely to have a bylaw or HOA reg about grass height or some other nit picky thing than the suburb of Portland ME because the OR suburb is wealthier and wealthy people have the time to care about these things, care about what the standards should be and care about how to enforce them.
Yes, many Americans live somewhere one or more rules/laws that control what they do on/with their own residential property. The Americans who are most represented here likely have far many laws/HOA rules with which they much comply.
Someone said it's "somewhat common in the US" to be restricted from growing eco-friendly laws. You "fixed" that statement by adjusting it to "somewhat common in the US in the parts of the US that are over-represented on HN".
The initial statement was true, there was nothing to fix. It might be "very common" among HN readers (though I'll bet they skew more urban than you're suggesting), but it really is "somewhat common" nationwide.
And the distinction isn't irrelevant, because this isn't just a parochial HN-reader concern - turf covers roughly 2% of US land. Not all of that is lawns, and not all of those lawns are legally constrained, but as I tried to demonstrate, the total amount is significant. I'm not objecting to the point that this situation has heavy demographic skew, I'm objecting to the implication that it isn't widespread.
In all seriousness, if anyone tells you you can't have a thriving eco system in your yard, fight them on every level. Manicured lawns should be outlawed, not encouraged.
That said, since the drought, there are thousands of dead lawns, and I've never seen these laws enforced.
Sometimes those can be even worse. I lived in a town of 300 growing up, and we often had to deal with the mayor's wife and occasionally the mayor himself coming to our door to tell us we were in violation of some lawn ordinance or another. This is particularly obnoxious considering that the only way to even look up town ordinances is to go to the other side of the county to view the documents at the county office.
This isn't SV specific DC, NYC or pretty much any other large city has a slow drip exodus of upper middle class people from it's suburbs to the less stifling suburbs of some other city with similar results.
Edit: Context: He's a permaculture farmer (one of the first), and has a really compelling solution to modern agriculture, in my opinion.