You know you can just break the rules when it comes to petty stuff like that, right? If you're not being unreasonable or thumbing your nose at them they typically don't come after you.

>and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds.

This is a direct result of the clean water act and knock on laws.

The clean water act mandates stormwater management. The solution needs to be maintained in perpetuity. The HOA is the entity saddled with this. There's various engineering calculations that go into pollutant load which impacts the size of the stormwater bullshit engineered ponds you need. In order to make the solution they are forced to build cheaper, the developer puts "no wrenching" (and a bunch of other things) in the initial HOA covenant.

The city ordinances are mostly the same. They're putting that shit in their so that the engineering numbers are better and their stormwater stuff can be cheaper.

That's not to say the snooty jerks don't like those rules for their own sake.