AFAIK, I can do with my garden whatever I want to do, as long as a I don't turn it into forrest. But that's here in Austria. What you describe sounds terrible. Fines for not mowing? In which country do you live?
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.
Edit: Context: He's a permaculture farmer (one of the first), and has a really compelling solution to modern agriculture, in my opinion.
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.
That said, since the drought, there are thousands of dead lawns, and I've never seen these laws enforced.