When I lived in Georgia, one of the houses in our subdivision was for sale. It wasn't well kept up at the time, and clearly needed some TLC. The folks that bought it were very nice, and we used to hang out in the evenings over a few adult beverages. They took excellent care of the place, did beautiful landscape work, etc.
The wife, after a couple of glasses [bottles?] of wine told us "You know, we only bought that place because we saw how bad the yard looked. We figured that if the HOA let them keep a yard like that, they wouldn't be Nazis about approving all the improvements we wanted to make."
I took a lesson from that. Now I live in Laguna Hills, CA, and again where I live has an HOA. But when driving through the neighborhood before buying the place, I noticed a couple of things:
1) A lot of open garage doors at random times during the day.
2) No uniformity of landscaping/etc.
3) A lot of pickup trucks.
I said to myself, "I can live here." I brew in the garage, facing the street. No hassles so far in 2 1/2 years. In fact, it's been the route by which I've met most of my neighbors!
Long story short: F*** Irvine.