Surprise! For millions, state laws hang community rules out to dry.

As we and others have reported, hundreds of thousands of people across Cascadia—and tens of millions across the United States—live where homeowners associations (HOAs) or apartment or condo rules ban clotheslines. Clotheslines are a quintessentially sustainable tool that saves money, prolongs clothes’ lifespan, and reduces pollution. A “right-to-dry” movement has sprung up and won laws in six states (Florida, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, and Vermont) to render these bans void and unenforceable. In another 13 states, I have discovered to my surprise and delight that solar access laws already on the books appear to protect solar drying.

Yet in 19 of these states, illegal bans persist in community rule books such as HOA Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) and a number that likely runs into the millions of residents do not know they have a right to dry. Solar access laws, many of them from the 1970s, and obscure amendments to state property law hardly fall in the category of common knowledge. When Sightline asked people to let us know about bans where they live, over a third of responses came from these 19 states.

Consider one example: The Forest Heights neighborhood, Oregon’s largest-ever new-home community, is located in Portland’s posh West Hills. The community boasts more than 1,600 single-family homes and covers 600 acres.

A pillar of the Forest Heights marketing campaign is environmental stewardship: The HOA website boasts that the community has set aside more than a third of its acreage as common green space, complete with seven walking trails and a private pond. The HOA offers residents a shuttle service.

Yet in direct contradiction to the community’s green claims, the Forest Heights CC&Rs limit placement of clotheslines to “service yards” that are “completely screened so that the elements screened are not visible at any time from the street or any adjoining property.” This amounts to a de facto ban. The average lot is under a quarter-acre, and nearly all homes have two stories, so completely concealing a clothesline is virtually impossible. The ban is also illegal, rendered toothless by a 1979 Oregon Law that says any restrictions on “solar radiation as a source for heating, cooling or electrical energy” are “void and unenforceable.”

Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of states’ solar rights because systems for hang-drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry. Clotheslines rely on solar energy, so their use is protected where laws provide blanket allowances for use of solar.

Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of Oregon’s, and other states’, solar rights because systems for hang drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry. Clotheslines rely on solar energy, so their use is protected where laws provide blanket allowances for solar usage.

In addition to Oregon, solar access laws in Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin all delineate a homeowner’s right to install a “solar energy system,” “solar energy device,” “solar collector,” “system for obtaining solar energy,” or “solar energy collection device.” The legal terminology varies, but the letter and spirit of these laws has one overarching message: homeowners may utilize the power of the sun.

Across the United States, more than a quarter million HOAs govern upward of 60 million people. Alexander Lee, a champion of the right-to-dry movement, estimates that “more than half of them [HOAs] restrict or ban the clothesline.” If he is right, then tens of millions of Americans are subject to either full or partial clothesline bans. Some 19 states, including populous ones such as California, Florida, and Texas, have right-to-dry laws. These facts combined suggest that millions of Americans live under illegal clothesline bans.So spre...