No permanent laundry lines is a very common restriction. Some probably restrict hang-drying clothes at all. Landscaping restrictions like that are common. Fence material/style/height restrictions guaranteed, and unless you're in a damn rich neighborhood with large lots you probably can't even do the full-on 50s dream white picket fence up to the sidewalk, since you aren't allowed to fence your front lawn. And the rich neighborhoods like that probably require brick or metal anyway. Exterior paint options usually restricted. No outbuildings or various restrictions on them very common. Shingle colors and/or material. Everything, really.
It's driven by a turtles-all-the-way-down thing where we're afraid that some future potential buyer of our houses or or neighbors houses will be turned off if they see those things, not necessarily because they care about them per se, but because they either see them as signaling a neighborhood in decline (so, a bad investment) or they're afraid other buyers will see it that way in the future (when they want to sell). As you may notice it's possible to end up in this weird state even when most people don't actually give a damn if you put up a clothes line, but at the same time a lot of them will support restrictions on your doing so, for the above Iocane-powder-scene reasoning.
This all applies in newer neighborhoods, and by newer I mean built after 1985 or so, certainly since 1995. HOAs[1], which are a kind of private hyper-local quasi-governmental thing, are ubiquitous now. Developer buys a big chunk of farmland, runs some squiggly roads through it, builds a bunch of houses (or has them built by other people and companies to whom they sell the lots), maybe a pool and a park (HOA maintained, not city, those are dying with the rise of HOAs—why would I want to pay into a city parks and pools system when I also pay, separately, for the ones provided by my HOA, which are the ones I use the most anyway?), perhaps a golf club and kinda bargain-basement country club thingy if it's a ritzy neighborhood, then sets up an HOA with a bunch of rules that will cover all the houses and their owners, acting effectively as dictator of it until some percentage of the lots are inhabited by owners (HOA members) at which point they take over, to some degree or another.
Further, the HOAs tend to delegate a bunch of stuff to management companies—I mean, even the kinds of busybodies who usually run the HOAs don't have time to do everything. There are fortunes built in those companies—there's real money going around. All this is funded by annual fees charged to the homeowners. Failure to pay will result in liens against your house (can't sell it without paying them off) and even foreclosure, as in the HOA will take your house because you didn't pay your $500/yr or whatever.
Condo associations are similar but with elevators and such to maintain, too, and no lawns to worry about. HOA's basically a condo association for detached housing.
It's driven by a turtles-all-the-way-down thing where we're afraid that some future potential buyer of our houses or or neighbors houses will be turned off if they see those things, not necessarily because they care about them per se, but because they either see them as signaling a neighborhood in decline (so, a bad investment) or they're afraid other buyers will see it that way in the future (when they want to sell). As you may notice it's possible to end up in this weird state even when most people don't actually give a damn if you put up a clothes line, but at the same time a lot of them will support restrictions on your doing so, for the above Iocane-powder-scene reasoning.
This all applies in newer neighborhoods, and by newer I mean built after 1985 or so, certainly since 1995. HOAs[1], which are a kind of private hyper-local quasi-governmental thing, are ubiquitous now. Developer buys a big chunk of farmland, runs some squiggly roads through it, builds a bunch of houses (or has them built by other people and companies to whom they sell the lots), maybe a pool and a park (HOA maintained, not city, those are dying with the rise of HOAs—why would I want to pay into a city parks and pools system when I also pay, separately, for the ones provided by my HOA, which are the ones I use the most anyway?), perhaps a golf club and kinda bargain-basement country club thingy if it's a ritzy neighborhood, then sets up an HOA with a bunch of rules that will cover all the houses and their owners, acting effectively as dictator of it until some percentage of the lots are inhabited by owners (HOA members) at which point they take over, to some degree or another.
Further, the HOAs tend to delegate a bunch of stuff to management companies—I mean, even the kinds of busybodies who usually run the HOAs don't have time to do everything. There are fortunes built in those companies—there's real money going around. All this is funded by annual fees charged to the homeowners. Failure to pay will result in liens against your house (can't sell it without paying them off) and even foreclosure, as in the HOA will take your house because you didn't pay your $500/yr or whatever.
Condo associations are similar but with elevators and such to maintain, too, and no lawns to worry about. HOA's basically a condo association for detached housing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association