Where the heck do you live? I'm in a small town in the south east coast of the US. I'm pretty sure our city crew would get fired (or shot) here for trying to forcibly mow someone's yard without their consent.
A decent sized city in the south east, its a common complaint around here but other people have done more to fight it. Since I don't own I haven't really pushed it but if I did I think I would. My guess is that it all has to do with property values, if I built a nice garden in the front lawn and it looked great it would be fine. Letting it just grow up not so much which is why I limit it to the back yard but my uptight neighbors don't want to be next to wildlife.
That said, "Florida friendly landscaping" (creating a yard that can adequately handle Florida's natural irrigation, which is not necessarily grass oriented) has been steadily growing in support. In fact, it's actually illegal for an HOA to prevent a Florida friendly landscape (https://www.volusia.org/core/fileparse.php/4163/urlt/HOAs.pd...), although in practice a lot of HOAs still enforce a "thou must have a large thirsty St. Augustine grass front lawn" code.
The key word is 'I rent'. Rental properties can be subject to more restrictions than owner-occupied properties and people who care enough to complain to the city (generally homeowners calling on rental properties) know when the laws of a jurisdiction is in their favor.
Where I live, the city has the power to abate nuisances, which involves notifying the property owner with a period of time given to bring the cited issue into compliance. If the property owner fails to correct the issue, city workers correct it and the property owner is billed an (outrageous) hourly rate, minimum 1 hour.
I'm not sure that it makes that much of a difference, the city doesn't seem to care who reads the letter or who pays the fine but it does affect how much I fight it and what I can do to get around it.