More states support 'right to dry'

Anybody remember wooden clothespins? We had the peg ones with little round heads, and the clip type, like the plastic clips people use today to close potato chip bags.

Buoyed by people’s desires both to be frugal and help the environment, clotheslines are making a comeback. That hasn’t been without controversy, The New York Times reported this week.

If you live in an older neighborhood in most cities, you can hang your wet clothes out to dry with impunity. But if, like 60 million Americans, you live in a homeowner association or other private development, your community’s rules probably ban clotheslines.

State legislatures are moving to change that. Florida and Utah for some time have upheld residents’ rights to dry their clothes outside. In the last year, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have given their citizens the right to dry their clothes outside, The Times reports, and bills upholding the “right to dry” are pending in Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia.

The percentage of Americans who find a clothes dryer to be a necessity has declined from 83% to 66% percent since 2006, a Pew Research Center survey found, suggesting that more Americans are willing to go back to drying their laundry outside or in the basement.

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Clothesline advocates argue that neighbors and homeowner association rules shouldn’t be able to keep them from saving money and saving energy. Opponents say the state legislatures have no right to overturn private communities’ rules. Not only that, they say, flapping sheets hurt property values.

“It’s already hard enough to sell a house in this economy,” Frank Rathbun, a spokesman for the national Community Associations Institute, told The Times. “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.”

Who could have thought, back in the 1960s when families were bringing their laundry indoors, that clotheslines would become a cause célèbre 40 years later? There’s even a movie scheduled to come out next year, “Drying for Freedom,” billed on its Web site as “the inconvenient truth about clotheslines.”

We are going to confess we are not exercising our right to dry, which as far as we know is fully protected in our historic neighborhood, where backyards are not visible from the street. But we have exercised this right in the past, when we had no dryer and no place to put one. It was far more economical, both in time and money, than using a coin laundry, though a bit challenging in the rainy season.

Jill Cooper of Living on a Dime notes that, not only does line drying save on energy costs, it also increases the lifespan of clothes. If you can’t put a clothesline in your yard, there are still alternatives to the clothes dryer, she notes.

J.D. Roth, of partner blog Get Rich Slowly, found his electricity consumption down considerably after his wife started hanging their clothes outside (and he moved his computer to an outside office).

Partner blogger Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar decided not to put up a clothesline, which he estimated would save 35 cents a load, in deference to his neighbors. But he questions why the frugal choice is seen as something that lowers property values.

I find it very interesting that the financially sensible choice, the frugal choice, is the one that’s seen as socially unacceptable today. Why did this change? During World War II, it was considered highly patriotic and a very socially good thing to use clotheslines, grow your own vegetables, wear clothes until they fell apart, and so on.

My only conclusion is that the perspective changed because of marketing. In each case, things that went from being viewed as patriotic and a social “good” to being signs of poverty and a social “bad” are all tied to buying more stuff. I reject that sentiment and try to practice frugality in that old-fashioned sense. We have a garden and we wear our clothes until they’re falling apart (and then use them as rags). The only thing keeping us from the clothesline is the idea of a net value loss.

What do you think? Do you hang your laundry out to dry? Would you object if your neighbors did? Or do you think it's a false economy and there are better ways to save money and energy?

Related reading:

• 10 easy ways to green your house
• 50 ways to trim your budget
• Save money saving the planet