Columbia's tyrannical clothesline rules
Here's one way to cut your electricity bill and help the planet: Fire your dryer. Running a clothes dryer four hours a week costs $2 or $3 and draws juice from polluting electricity plants. Drying wash on an outdoor line costs nothing. Unfortunately, some believe clotheslines are visual pollution -- a status hangup from the days when outdoor laundry was thought to tarnish one as downscale. There must be something wrong with you if you can't afford a dryer.
Many communities restrict or ban clotheslines. In the Columbia village of Wilde Lake, you can use only umbrella or retractable lines. Your application must include "a sketch of the clothesline showing sytle, color, materials and operational techniques," a "plat plan showing the intended location of the clothesline" and "a sketch of the fence or other enclosure that will screen the clothesline from view." The operational technique at my house is this: We hang clothes on a rope until they aren't wet.
Fortunately there's a growing backlash. The New Hampshire-based Project Laundry List militantly promotes the "right to dry" and has proclaimed April 19 "National Hanging Out Day." At the National Association of Attorneys General conference on energy earlier this month, Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden exhorted his peers to fight clothesline repression. "We are blind to some of the simplest solutions," Wasden said, according to the Associated Press. "Clotheslines are not pretty enough for our notion of the American dream." Apparently he wants officials to go easy on unlicensed clothesline perps.
Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler was at the conference, in Coeur D'Alene. He's pro-clothesline, says spokeswoman Raquel Guillory. "Of course we support naturally spring-fresh laundry," she said. But it doesn't sound like he's about to interfere with Columbia's laundry covenants. "You have to respect the restrictions of private community associations," she said.
No you don't. The time for civil laundry disobedience is now. Let 1,000 brassieres and socks bloom and flap in the backyard breeze.
Comments
I hang my clothes out whenever the weather permits. The sheets smelled GREAT and were very soft from being wind-blown yesterday. One of the reasons we bought our current home is because there were old-fashioned laundry lines already up and there are no covenant restrictions on using them. It's one of the advantages of buying an older home.
Ontario, Canada, overruled neighborhood covenants that banned the use of clotheslines. Here's a link to one article that discussed the issue. It may not be that big an energy user when just one home is running a dryer, but when hundreds of thousands of them are...
http://www.thestar.com/article/415836
Posted by: Mar | May 23, 2008 11:56 AM
I would say advocating blatant disrespect for the rules of your HOA is a good way to get fined. While I agree that the prohibition on clotheslines is perhaps overkill, petition your Association to have the rule suspended. Associations should enforce their rules; if you let "little" things like clotheslines slip, it's not very long before people begin to undertake unauthorized exterior renovations (painting, fence building, etc) because they perceive the HOA does not enforce the rules.
Posted by: HOA | May 23, 2008 1:45 PM
HOA's comment is WHY I made sure we would not have to deal with an HOA when we bought our current home. WHY should I have to have all exterior changes approved? WHY should the HOA be able to tell me how tall my plants can be, what color my door can be, what type of fencing I can have, etc. Oh, I forgot, cookie-cutter uniformity SUPPOSEDLY keeps house values and prices up. Funny, our neighborhood doesn't have those restrictions and we've still maintained our value, as evidenced by a recent reappraisal I had done for a refi of my mortgage to 15 years and by a couple recent sales.
P.S. Commenter HOA, I'm not picking on you so I hope it doesn't come across that way. I am making comments on what I see as the militant members of homeowners' associations who want everything to be "just so".
Posted by: Mar | May 23, 2008 2:15 PM