Clothesline Ban = Gone! (Finally)
- Posted by Tatiana
- Filed in Environment
- April 20, 2008

Today I woke up to a familiar, but somewhat forgotten sight: shirts and towels fluttering in the gentle summer-like breeze. My neighbours have set up a clothesline in their backyard! The reason I seem to be so excited about this seemingly mundane fact is that up until a couple of days ago hanging out your clothes to dry would have been illegal for many home dwellers across Toronto. While there was no city-wide clothesline ban (at least I can't find any evidence of it), many subdivisions had anti-clothesline covenants in effect - restrictive clauses that tell you what you can and can't do with your property.
Well, as of last Friday all such restrictions are deemed void by the provincial government - when it comes to ground-level houses anyway. Apartment and condo dwellers may still be disallowed to hand their laundry on balconies - apparently due to "safety concerns". Funny - I used to think of clotheslines and clothes as rather benign objects.
Of course, encouraging people to use hang their clothes to dry instead of throwing them into a dryer is a step in the right direction. When it comes to household appliances, dryers are among the biggest energy hogs , gobbling down five to ten times more energy per hour than washing machines, and accounting for about 6% of the typical household energy consumption. And if you are a Toronto resident, you can even get a clothesline for free between April 26 and May 11, courtesy of Toronto Hydro.
What I found most interesting is the amount of debate this news generated on various blogs and discussion boards. Outlawing a ridiculous ban to help save energy seems like an absolute no-brainer to me - the only thing wrong with it is that it came so late! And yet more than a few folks on the web (though nowhere near the majority) seem to be objecting to the sight of neighbours' laundry, especially *gasp!* underwear. Talk about uptight!







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If the wind takes an article of clothing off a clothesline in a suburban setting, no harm done. It'll likely just end up in the corner of your yard or in a neighbours yard. If you lose a piece of clothing off of a balcony, you have no yard so it's pretty much guaranteed that it will end up in public space, and likely that public space will be the adjacent road.
People lose clothing off their suburban lines all the time. Add a strong updraft and multiply that by the dozens of units in a building and you have a very real safety concern.