Saving energy can be as simple as not opening the dryer door. Just hang those freshly laundered clothes on the green-as-green-can-be contraption known as a clothesline. Time and (if the device is outdoors) Ol' Sol will drip-dry them just fine, without electricity or natural gas. But not, alas, in many of America's subdivisions. As a Chapel Hill woman frustratingly found out, many neighborhood covenants -- deed restrictions governing what homeowners may and may not do -- prohibit outdoor clothes drying.
Not attractive, apparently. And back when few people worried about energy consumption, why bother?
That didn't seem right to Deborah Fulghieri, a fan of fresh-air drying who last fall asked the Chapel Hill Town Council to overrule covenants that ban clotheslines.
She won a partial victory this month. The town will see to it that clotheslines and other "solar collection devices" are allowed in future developments, but it says it doesn't have the power to overrule existing bans. Fortunately, the neighborhood where Fulghieri lives is allowing her to dry her clothes outside.
So that leaves hanging -- or not hanging -- people in other existing developments in Chapel Hill, and would-be outside dryers stuck with restrictive covenants statewide.
Although municipalities in some other states apparently do have the power to override neighborhood covenants, in North Carolina a statewide solution seems the way to go.
After all, in 2005 the legislature told homeowners associations in no uncertain terms that they could no longer bar residents from flying the U.S. flag (there's a federal law along the same lines, too). If the state can say that all residents, covenant-bound or not, can hang the flag out front, surely it can say they can hang the blue jeans out back.
Now there's an energy-saving plank for a vote-hungry candidate's platform!
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