Ontario doesn’t allow clothesline bans either (for any Ontarians wondering)…
I’ve never understood this aversion to clotheslines. Admittedly I’m “poor people,” but I’ve always loved the sight of clothes drying on a line. Even more than the sight of a sunrise, 'cuz sunrise happens too dang early.
My parents built a house about 10 years ago in a new subdivision that had caveats on what they could build, how soon they had to build after purchasing the section, what materials they could build with, how tall the building could be how close to the boundary, what kind of fences they could have, what kind of dogs they could own, the list went on, so they built to those conditions. Then nobody would buy any of the sections because the rules were so strict, so they were asked if they would agree to relax the caveats, they did, but they felt sort of cheesed off that they had needed to meet them and received no benefit from relaxing them in fact it was pretty nice to live there with no other houses there. The house will be demolished in the next week or so as it was destroyed by the earthquakes we had her in New Zealand. I also had a friend in South Africa who lived in one of these kind of subdivisions and the rain would hit her kitchen door leading outside quite directly and flood her kitchen but the subdivision wouldn’t let her build a small awning above the door to stop this because then her house would look different to the other houses. I understand perhaps wanting some rules but sometimes it just goes too far. BTW in NZ nobody would get away with this clothesline BS.
yay i’m in one of the (on this, and ONLY this, issue) reasonable states.
FINALLY!
why would you have an aversion to clotheslines? i mean maybe in like new york in the mid to late 19th century to early 20th century with clotheslines running from one window to another. but just about anywhere else clotheslines are cool, and they leave your clothes smelling so much nicer than the dryer.
Personally, though I have no objection to anyone else’s clothesline, I never liked line-dried clothes. Maybe there was something wrong with our water or detergent, but line-dried jeans always feel too stiff to me.
(For the record, that was a cheesy photoshop job intended as a joke.)
Put the line in your garage! I live in Texas where the weather is unreliable at times. Throw the clothes in the washer when you wake up, hang them on the line because the sky is clear and the weather-person promises no rain and you will come home to soggy clothes guaranteed. But, the garage is like an oven and it will suck the moisture out of just about anything left in there. If you put a line in your garage and hang everything up before you leave for work it will all be perfectly dry when you get home.
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Growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto of bungalow’s and war camp survivors, they passed on with old age and their grand children demolished their homes and built massive 3rd floor homes, which they flipped. Soon the neighbourhood which use too have 3 foot chain linked fences in back yards gave way too 7 foot wooden fences. The gardens where gone giving way too land scaping. The neighbourly chats over the fence where gone replaced with the typical socially accepted quick chat. The cloth lines were gone too. Eventually, the new neighbours tried too ban back yard clothes lines as unsightly.
Ironic, the grandchildren of the Jewish war survivors would look down on the lower working class types still in the neighbourhood (many who were jewish) without appreciating the struggle their grandparents endured too get them (the grandchildren) where they are today. A spin on Arthur Miller’s only novel “Focus”. Drive out the undesirables.
4% totally not caring seems reasonable.
They guy’s name is really Pecksniff? Is he buddies with Wiener?
Around here the trick was to mount your antenna on wheels because then it is a vehicle and not covered by council bylaws which regulate structures.
I don’t understand this at all. Why can’t everyone, including the judicial system, tell people like this to fuck off?
My response to this article was to snort that Columbia, MD will now be forced to bear the unsightly view of clotheslines. When I bought a townhouse there I received three huge binders full of rules - 1 binder for the town, 1 for the village within the town, and one of the HOA. I feel quite certain that clotheslines are banned, as were parking certain kinds of vehicles in front of your house, using any siding that was not vinyl, painting or staining your deck anything other than an ugly shade of brown, and putting a skylight on the wrong side of your house. I support this law solely to kick that town in its balls.
As far as the reason for HOAs, in areas where there is not concept of zoning, it helps to keep a more upscale appearance to the neighborhood. In areas like Columbia, where they live to zone, it is simply because the prevailing assumption is that rules are good, and more rules are more good.
If I had an HOA (and a clothesline), and someone nosy neighbor, petty tyrant, or other obnoxious undesirable started pestering me about it, I’d probably start drying my clothes on top of tomato stakes in the yard, or maybe hang them out the window.
I can be that way sometimes.
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Assuming you have a garage.
I get some type of violation (city ordinance) at least once a year from the patrols our housing code enforcement squad does. I think they like to pick on us (our area) because we are a historical district and are grant certain leeways. Mine are always for bullshit things, which I fix and the issue is solved.
When I bought a house in 2008, finding a non-HOA neighborhood was a struggle with my budget. But I absolutely refuse to live somewhere with this insane petty tyrants. When I was little I briefly lived in Sugarland, a suburb of Houston, Texas. These people moved into the house on the corner and promptly painted the house an unapproved shade of purple, and painted their fence to match. The neighborhood HOA flipped, and the people on our block were directed to shun them. I wasn’t allowed to play with their kids. Over the paint.
As long as people aren’t doing things dangerous to the health of everyone, like say running a meth lab or breeding feral hogs, I don’t give a damn about the paint or the yard. There’s a lovely lime green house down the block and a purple one. I’d be thrilled to see people growing vegetables in the front yard instead of grass.
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While HOAs are pure evil, that’s a moral failure of your parents and neighbors, not a problem with the HOA per se.
They’d come up with a different “danger” instead.
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And let’s not forget that some people move to the suburbs to get away from “those people” (in their neighborhood, school, etc.) and think of HOAs as a furtherance of that ideal. It’s only when something they want to do gets caught in the HOA web of control that they register there’s a problem.
LOL! I don’t think I’ve seen/heard a better encapsulation of how it’s actually gotten worse in the past 50 years.
In my neighborhood, a family with 4 kids couldn’t agree on which color to use to re-paint their frame house, so they put up a poll on their fence and asked all the neighbors to indicate their preference. Two of the kids were rooting for purple, so they went door to door and also hung out at the fence accosting passersby to vote for that color (apparently, the dad was vehemently opposed, but willing to abide by the rules of the poll). Sure enough, purple won by a landslide. The house looks great!
Oh, and they put a sweet little painted scene under the peak of their roof…painted by one of the kids. I bet that wouldn’t be allowed in most HOAs either.
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