Clothesline bans stir rights battles

CANTON, Ohio — After taking a class that covered global warming last year, Jill Saylor decided to save energy by drying her laundry on a clothesline at her mobile home.

"I figured trailer parks were the one place left where hanging your laundry was actually still allowed," she said, standing in front of her tidy, yellow mobile home on an impeccably manicured lawn.

But she was wrong. Like the majority of the 60 million people who live in the nation's roughly 300,000 private communities, Saylor was forbidden to dry her laundry outside because many people viewed it as an eyesore, not unlike storing junk cars in driveways, and a marker of poverty that lowers property values.

In the past year, however, state lawmakers in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have overridden these local rules with legislation protecting the right to hang laundry outdoors, citing environmental concerns, because clothes dryers use at least 6 percent of all household electricity consumed.

Florida and Utah already had such laws, and similar bills are being considered in Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia, clothesline advocates say.

The new laws have provoked a debate. Proponents argue people should not be prohibited by their neighbors or community agreements from saving on energy bills or acting in an environmentally minded way. Opponents say the laws lifting bans erode local property rights and undermine the autonomy of private communities.

"It's already hard enough to sell a house in this economy," said Frank Rathbun, a spokesman for the national Community Associations Institute, an advocacy and education organization for community associations. "And when it comes to clotheslines, it should be up to each community association, not state lawmakers, to set rules, much like it is with rules involving parking, architectural guidelines or pets."

As much a cultural clash as a political and economic one, the issue is causing tensions as homeowners, landlords and property managers have traded nasty letters and threats of legal action.

"I think sheets dangling in the wind are beautiful if they're helping the environment," said Mary Lou Sayer, 88, who was told by fellow residents at her condominium in Concord, N.H., that she could not hang her laundry outdoors after her daughter recently suggested she do so to save energy.

Richard Jacques, 63, president of the condominium's board, said he had moved to the community specifically for its strict regulations. "Those rules are why when I look out my window I now see birds, trees and flowers, not laundry," he said.

"It seems like such a mundane thing, hanging laundry, and yet it draws in all these questions about individual rights, private property, class, aesthetics, the environment," said Steven Lake, a British filmmaker who is releasing a documentary next May called "Drying for Freedom," about the clothesline debate in the United States.

The film follows the case of feuding neighbors in Verona, Miss., where the police say one man shot and killed another last year because he was tired of telling the man to stop hanging his laundry outside.

Jeanne Bridgforth, a real-estate agent in Richmond, Va., said that while she had no opinion on clotheslines, most of her clients were not thrilled with the idea of seeing their neighbors' underwear blowing in the breeze.

She recalled how she was unable to sell a beautifully restored Victorian home because it looked out onto a neighbor's laundry hanging from a second-story back porch. In June, the house went into foreclosure.

Changing the law isn't always necessary. Saylor, from the mobile-home park, said, "Pressure makes a difference." After a petition calling on the owner of the property where she lived to reverse the prohibition against line-drying laundry, she said, the owner recently acquiesced.