7 ms·

There was a tangentiel post earlier today on HN about letting your garden grow wild. Also, when I was a kid in southern California, my parents used to dry laun

by anonu 7y ago

There was a tangentiel post earlier today on HN about letting your garden grow wild. Also, when I was a kid in southern California, my parents used to dry laundry on a clothes line, outside. We were lucky to have a big backyard so you would imagine not many neighbors would complain. We got a letter from the neighborhood saying the laundry was unsightly. This is strange to me to this day. First, air dryed laundry smells and feels amazing. Second, you're saving a ton of energy by not using an electric or gas dryer. But the sight of some towels and bed sheets on a clothes line makes people really upset....

Kadin 7y ago
Line-drying vs machine drying was, and I suppose still is for some older people (who probably inhabit the bulk of HOA boards and such) a class issue. People with means had mechanical clothes dryers; poorer people didn't. (Clothes washers achieved much greater market penetration and did so significantly before clothes dryers.) Even going back to before home laundry machines, to what is today an older person's grandparents' era, in big cities the low-cost option was to have your laundry returned to you wet, and you dried and folded it yourself. People with more money, naturally, got theirs returned dry and folded. Scratch the surface of any obnoxious neighborhood rule and you'll find some sort of class-consciousness or economic insecurity behind it. People don't want to see laundry because it reminds them of poor people, or they're afraid it will make the neighborhood look poorer than it is. I'm not saying that's a good opinion to hold, but I think that's why it's a weirdly sensitive issue. In another generation when it's firmly an ecological/"green" thing to line-dry your clothes, and not a sign that you can't afford to do it any other way, there probably won't be any opposition. Then it's not a social class signifier, it's just an individual oddity.
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  This is such an interesting perspective. Though she's never said it, I suspect my grandmother (96! this year) sees vegetarianism the same way— people with means could afford meat, whereas poorer folks simply couldn't. Intentionally choosing to limit or eliminate meat consumption just boggles her mind. This perspective kind of boggles mine. I hadn't though to extrapolate that position to other topics!
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    In my understanding, this kind of thinking is how the American diet came to be so heavy in meat, sugar, salt, and fat, with such enormous portions.
    - lordgrenville 7y ago
      Surely that's just evolution/biology? People will naturally tend to eat bigger portions, and more energy-dense foods.
  - steanne 7y ago
    what food is easily available to the poor and hence looked down upon has changed significantly over the years. people used to be embarassed to have to eat lobster.
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      Friend of mine has a masters in Medieval sociology. He said one of the places he studied there was a law that you couldn't feed your servants salmon more than X days a week.
      - molmalo 7y ago
        Some time ago I watched this video: What Did Peasants Eat in Medieval Times? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w) I was surprised to learn that some food we nowdays consider expensive was very low-class back then, and viceversa, as availability and costumes changed over time. Salmon being one of the examples. I recommend that series of videos if you like this kind of stuff.
        Gibbon1 7y ago
        My mother said her 1958 cookbook she got as a wedding gift suggested that 'budget conscious' (meaning poor) housewives could consider cheaper types of meat like salmon. My ex's family if I can tell were immediately descended from impoverished sharecroppers. Grandma picked tobacco when she was a little girl. Her family when they had money ate badly cooked steak a couple of times a week. Definitely a class thing. My family being pretty much solidly middle class and from California that sort of thing just wasn't.
- igravious 7y ago
  Can't hang out your laundry? Can't grow veggies? How common is this sort of thing in the States, I had no idea. Are there other things that are frowned upon or forbidden over there that might be perfectly normal elsewhere?
  - aiisjustanif 7y ago
    Casual sex in the south. I said it as a joke, but this is only comparing it to living in Europe, the stigma around sex or being called derogatory terms for it is much less of a thing in Europe. But other things like washing dishes by hand. Owning an old car while being middle class. In general everything "laborious" while being in the middle/upper class or living by.
  - asark 7y ago
    No permanent laundry lines is a very common restriction. Some probably restrict hang-drying clothes at all. Landscaping restrictions like that are common. Fence material/style/height restrictions guaranteed, and unless you're in a damn rich neighborhood with large lots you probably can't even do the full-on 50s dream white picket fence up to the sidewalk, since you aren't allowed to fence your front lawn. And the rich neighborhoods like that probably require brick or metal anyway. Exterior paint options usually restricted. No outbuildings or various restrictions on them very common. Shingle colors and/or material. Everything, really. It's driven by a turtles-all-the-way-down thing where we're afraid that some future potential buyer of our houses or or neighbors houses will be turned off if they see those things, not necessarily because they care about them per se, but because they either see them as signaling a neighborhood in decline (so, a bad investment) or they're afraid other buyers will see it that way in the future (when they want to sell). As you may notice it's possible to end up in this weird state even when most people don't actually give a damn if you put up a clothes line, but at the same time a lot of them will support restrictions on your doing so, for the above Iocane-powder-scene reasoning. This all applies in newer neighborhoods, and by newer I mean built after 1985 or so, certainly since 1995. HOAs[1], which are a kind of private hyper-local quasi-governmental thing, are ubiquitous now. Developer buys a big chunk of farmland, runs some squiggly roads through it, builds a bunch of houses (or has them built by other people and companies to whom they sell the lots), maybe a pool and a park (HOA maintained, not city, those are dying with the rise of HOAs—why would I want to pay into a city parks and pools system when I also pay, separately, for the ones provided by my HOA, which are the ones I use the most anyway?), perhaps a golf club and kinda bargain-basement country club thingy if it's a ritzy neighborhood, then sets up an HOA with a bunch of rules that will cover all the houses and their owners, acting effectively as dictator of it until some percentage of the lots are inhabited by owners (HOA members) at which point they take over, to some degree or another. Further, the HOAs tend to delegate a bunch of stuff to management companies—I mean, even the kinds of busybodies who usually run the HOAs don't have time to do everything. There are fortunes built in those companies—there's real money going around. All this is funded by annual fees charged to the homeowners. Failure to pay will result in liens against your house (can't sell it without paying them off) and even foreclosure, as in the HOA will take your house because you didn't pay your $500/yr or whatever. Condo associations are similar but with elevators and such to maintain, too, and no lawns to worry about. HOA's basically a condo association for detached housing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
Crontab 7y ago
> We got a letter from the neighborhood saying the laundry was unsightly. Florida actually has a law for that too - which disallows HOAs from banning them.
mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
Here in Japan everyone dries their laundry outside. It’s a bit of extra work but we save a ton of energy, stuff doesn’t shrink as much, laundry smells like the sun, I like it.
- frutiger 7y ago
  Here in Manhattan, almost no one has an outside. I must be wrong but from the few times I’ve visited Japan, vast swathes of Tokyo is the same.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    I'd be hesitant to try it in urban areas, since the air pollution particularly above streets could be quite bad. I'm sure it depends on a lot of particular local factors though.
    - shitloadofbooks 7y ago
      Where does the air for your electric dryer come from though. Surely it's the same as the air from your balcony?
  - flippinburgers 7y ago
    People usually use their balconies, though small, to hang and dry laundry.
  - pas 7y ago
    You can dry them inside too. https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1JbgNSFXXXXX6apXXq6xXFXXXU/202428546/HTB1JbgNSFXXXXX6apXXq6xXFXXXU.jpg https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1JbgNSFXXXXX6apXXq6xXFXXXU/202...
    - CaptainMarvel 7y ago
      Got to be careful with in the UK with the build-up of humidity!
flukus 7y ago
This sounds like another planet to me. In Australia it's completely normal to put clothes on the line for anyone that doesn't live in a building of at least several stories. Every house has a clothes line and most apartment blocks have communal ones. Not using them (weather and time permitting) is usually considered laziness. The closest I've come to rules like this is one apartment that didn't allow small lines on the balcony. Plus, banning clothes lines would ruin one of our most sacred traditions (possibly NSFW) : https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goon+of+fortune&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goon+of+fortune&ia=images&iax=imag...
gopkarthik 7y ago
Drying clothes out in the sun is the defacto practice in India and it's really surprising that people would complain about this. I feel the same way too; Clothes dried in sunlight always seem fresher and crispier (if it makes sense).
- onion2k 7y ago
  The UV light in sunshine kills off the bacteria that grow on damp washing. It's far better to dry clothes outside.
  - CaptainMarvel 7y ago
    Does the UV light not also damage the clothes causing colours to lose vibrancy? If so, this would reduce the lifespan
    - jdietrich 7y ago
      UV does have a bleaching effect on pigments, but that's a feature rather than a bug for white items.
  - tropo 7y ago
    The birds and squirrels add worse bacteria, plus viruses and parasites. Bacteria do not grow in a hot dryer machine.
aiisjustanif 7y ago
Meanwhile in all counties outside of the US... Amsterdam? Hanging clothes. Argentina? Hanging clothes. UK, France, South Korea? Hanging clothes. How can this be so triggering in the US.

by anonu 7y ago

Kadin 7y ago

Line-drying vs machine drying was, and I suppose still is for some older people (who probably inhabit the bulk of HOA boards and such) a class issue. People with means had mechanical clothes dryers; poorer people didn't. (Clothes washers achieved much greater market penetration and did so significantly before clothes dryers.) Even going back to before home laundry machines, to what is today an older person's grandparents' era, in big cities the low-cost option was to have your laundry returned to you wet, and you dried and folded it yourself. People with more money, naturally, got theirs returned dry and folded. Scratch the surface of any obnoxious neighborhood rule and you'll find some sort of class-consciousness or economic insecurity behind it. People don't want to see laundry because it reminds them of poor people, or they're afraid it will make the neighborhood look poorer than it is. I'm not saying that's a good opinion to hold, but I think that's why it's a weirdly sensitive issue. In another generation when it's firmly an ecological/"green" thing to line-dry your clothes, and not a sign that you can't afford to do it any other way, there probably won't be any opposition. Then it's not a social class signifier, it's just an individual oddity.

ultrarunner 7y ago
This is such an interesting perspective. Though she's never said it, I suspect my grandmother (96! this year) sees vegetarianism the same way— people with means could afford meat, whereas poorer folks simply couldn't. Intentionally choosing to limit or eliminate meat consumption just boggles her mind. This perspective kind of boggles mine. I hadn't though to extrapolate that position to other topics!
- nerdponx 7y ago
  In my understanding, this kind of thinking is how the American diet came to be so heavy in meat, sugar, salt, and fat, with such enormous portions.
  - lordgrenville 7y ago
    Surely that's just evolution/biology? People will naturally tend to eat bigger portions, and more energy-dense foods.
- steanne 7y ago
  what food is easily available to the poor and hence looked down upon has changed significantly over the years. people used to be embarassed to have to eat lobster.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Friend of mine has a masters in Medieval sociology. He said one of the places he studied there was a law that you couldn't feed your servants salmon more than X days a week.
    - molmalo 7y ago
      Some time ago I watched this video: What Did Peasants Eat in Medieval Times? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w) I was surprised to learn that some food we nowdays consider expensive was very low-class back then, and viceversa, as availability and costumes changed over time. Salmon being one of the examples. I recommend that series of videos if you like this kind of stuff.
      - Gibbon1 7y ago
        My mother said her 1958 cookbook she got as a wedding gift suggested that 'budget conscious' (meaning poor) housewives could consider cheaper types of meat like salmon. My ex's family if I can tell were immediately descended from impoverished sharecroppers. Grandma picked tobacco when she was a little girl. Her family when they had money ate badly cooked steak a couple of times a week. Definitely a class thing. My family being pretty much solidly middle class and from California that sort of thing just wasn't.
igravious 7y ago
Can't hang out your laundry? Can't grow veggies? How common is this sort of thing in the States, I had no idea. Are there other things that are frowned upon or forbidden over there that might be perfectly normal elsewhere?
- aiisjustanif 7y ago
  Casual sex in the south. I said it as a joke, but this is only comparing it to living in Europe, the stigma around sex or being called derogatory terms for it is much less of a thing in Europe. But other things like washing dishes by hand. Owning an old car while being middle class. In general everything "laborious" while being in the middle/upper class or living by.
- asark 7y ago
  No permanent laundry lines is a very common restriction. Some probably restrict hang-drying clothes at all. Landscaping restrictions like that are common. Fence material/style/height restrictions guaranteed, and unless you're in a damn rich neighborhood with large lots you probably can't even do the full-on 50s dream white picket fence up to the sidewalk, since you aren't allowed to fence your front lawn. And the rich neighborhoods like that probably require brick or metal anyway. Exterior paint options usually restricted. No outbuildings or various restrictions on them very common. Shingle colors and/or material. Everything, really. It's driven by a turtles-all-the-way-down thing where we're afraid that some future potential buyer of our houses or or neighbors houses will be turned off if they see those things, not necessarily because they care about them per se, but because they either see them as signaling a neighborhood in decline (so, a bad investment) or they're afraid other buyers will see it that way in the future (when they want to sell). As you may notice it's possible to end up in this weird state even when most people don't actually give a damn if you put up a clothes line, but at the same time a lot of them will support restrictions on your doing so, for the above Iocane-powder-scene reasoning. This all applies in newer neighborhoods, and by newer I mean built after 1985 or so, certainly since 1995. HOAs[1], which are a kind of private hyper-local quasi-governmental thing, are ubiquitous now. Developer buys a big chunk of farmland, runs some squiggly roads through it, builds a bunch of houses (or has them built by other people and companies to whom they sell the lots), maybe a pool and a park (HOA maintained, not city, those are dying with the rise of HOAs—why would I want to pay into a city parks and pools system when I also pay, separately, for the ones provided by my HOA, which are the ones I use the most anyway?), perhaps a golf club and kinda bargain-basement country club thingy if it's a ritzy neighborhood, then sets up an HOA with a bunch of rules that will cover all the houses and their owners, acting effectively as dictator of it until some percentage of the lots are inhabited by owners (HOA members) at which point they take over, to some degree or another. Further, the HOAs tend to delegate a bunch of stuff to management companies—I mean, even the kinds of busybodies who usually run the HOAs don't have time to do everything. There are fortunes built in those companies—there's real money going around. All this is funded by annual fees charged to the homeowners. Failure to pay will result in liens against your house (can't sell it without paying them off) and even foreclosure, as in the HOA will take your house because you didn't pay your $500/yr or whatever. Condo associations are similar but with elevators and such to maintain, too, and no lawns to worry about. HOA's basically a condo association for detached housing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association

Crontab 7y ago

> We got a letter from the neighborhood saying the laundry was unsightly. Florida actually has a law for that too - which disallows HOAs from banning them.

mrhappyunhappy 7y ago

Here in Japan everyone dries their laundry outside. It’s a bit of extra work but we save a ton of energy, stuff doesn’t shrink as much, laundry smells like the sun, I like it.

frutiger 7y ago
Here in Manhattan, almost no one has an outside. I must be wrong but from the few times I’ve visited Japan, vast swathes of Tokyo is the same.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  I'd be hesitant to try it in urban areas, since the air pollution particularly above streets could be quite bad. I'm sure it depends on a lot of particular local factors though.
  - shitloadofbooks 7y ago
    Where does the air for your electric dryer come from though. Surely it's the same as the air from your balcony?
- flippinburgers 7y ago
  People usually use their balconies, though small, to hang and dry laundry.
- pas 7y ago
  You can dry them inside too. https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1JbgNSFXXXXX6apXXq6xXFXXXU/202428546/HTB1JbgNSFXXXXX6apXXq6xXFXXXU.jpg https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1JbgNSFXXXXX6apXXq6xXFXXXU/202...
  - CaptainMarvel 7y ago
    Got to be careful with in the UK with the build-up of humidity!

flukus 7y ago

This sounds like another planet to me. In Australia it's completely normal to put clothes on the line for anyone that doesn't live in a building of at least several stories. Every house has a clothes line and most apartment blocks have communal ones. Not using them (weather and time permitting) is usually considered laziness. The closest I've come to rules like this is one apartment that didn't allow small lines on the balcony. Plus, banning clothes lines would ruin one of our most sacred traditions (possibly NSFW) : https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goon+of+fortune&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goon+of+fortune&ia=images&iax=imag...

gopkarthik 7y ago

Drying clothes out in the sun is the defacto practice in India and it's really surprising that people would complain about this. I feel the same way too; Clothes dried in sunlight always seem fresher and crispier (if it makes sense).

onion2k 7y ago
The UV light in sunshine kills off the bacteria that grow on damp washing. It's far better to dry clothes outside.
- CaptainMarvel 7y ago
  Does the UV light not also damage the clothes causing colours to lose vibrancy? If so, this would reduce the lifespan
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    UV does have a bleaching effect on pigments, but that's a feature rather than a bug for white items.
- tropo 7y ago
  The birds and squirrels add worse bacteria, plus viruses and parasites. Bacteria do not grow in a hot dryer machine.

aiisjustanif 7y ago

Meanwhile in all counties outside of the US... Amsterdam? Hanging clothes. Argentina? Hanging clothes. UK, France, South Korea? Hanging clothes. How can this be so triggering in the US.