Maryland homeowners should be free to hang their clothes outside to dry, according to a state delegate who is proposing legislation that would prohibit homeowners associations from banning the use of clotheslines.
Del. Galen Clagett, D-Frederick County, said homeowners associations should be able to craft rules about when and where their members dry their clothes outside, but shouldn’t be able to ban outdoor drying altogether.
“We’ve gotten spoiled to the point where we don’t want to watch people’s underwear dry,” said Clagett, who owns a company that manages 155 homeowners associations in four states.
But homeowners associations say outside drying can diminish a neighborhood’s curb appeal and hurt property values.
Frank Rathbun, spokesman for the trade group Community Associations Institute in Alexandria, said the decision to allow or ban outside drying should be made by the neighbors who make up homeowners associations.
“Who is in a better position to make that decision, the government or the association? I think that question answers itself,” Rathbun said.
But a woman who hangs her laundry in the backyard of her town house in a planned community in Gaithersburg, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid paying a fine, said her homeowners association was overstepping its role by banning clotheslines.
“It’s just none of their business,” she said, adding she couldn’t afford to move to neighborhoods that did not have an association.
Clagett proposed a bill last session that was quickly killed. Similar legislation has passed in a handful of states as outside drying has become more popular nationwide, said Alexander Lee, executive director of Project Laundry List. Lee said people were motivated to dry their clothes outside both to help the environment and to save on their energy bills.
Data from the U.S. Department of Energyshow that household dryers use 5.8 percent of total energy consumption, but Lee’s group calculates that dryers eat up 10 to 15 percent of “domestic energy.”
Jennifer Macris, an Annapolis mother of five who does one or two loads of laundry a day, said the savings in her family’s electric bill were noticeable from drying clothes outside.
But Macris said it was not all about saving money and that she enjoyed spending time outside with her children while hanging clothes to dry.
“It really became a little oasis for me,” she said.
Laundry list
Poll: Should community associations, as private organizations, be forced by government to allow individual residents to hang their laundry on clotheslines that are visible to their neighbors?
» Yes: 18 percent
» No: 74 percent
» Not sure: 8 percent
Results of 2007 poll conducted by Zogby International sponsored by Foundation for Community Association Research, a homeowners association trade group.
