What's behind the thought process?

We went to Boston to see the circus yesterday. We live on Cape Cod in an area where the houses must sit on 1/2 acre or more. The city is not new to us as both my hub and myself grew up outside of NY - within view and about a 15 minute drive. What's new is my thoughts. Lots of people, lots of rules.

If you go to the "real" country - houses that look like specks to each other - there are no rules. You live how you need to live, you make your own rules. No one is going to dare tell you that you can't dry your clothes in the sunshine or plant a garden. The rules may increase ever so slightly as the population becomes more dense but it's a tediously slow increase.

Then you get to places that are more densely populated such as cities, planned communities, apartments, etc. and the rules go over the top. You can't do this, you better not do that. You are no longer living in your own home, living your own life. You are, in essence, guests, in someone else's home and are expected to act as good guests would.

What are these folks afraid of? Do they think that if they allow residents to hang laundry on clotheslines that all hell is going to break loose and the next thing they will see are drug dealers running the streets and random shootings?

Maybe they aren't afraid at all. Maybe they are just on a power trip that includes micro- managing every aspect of their "guests" being.

I'll continue to try to put myself on each of these sides so I can try to understand where they're coming from but it's tough to understand why something so minor as hanging laundry in the sun evokes fear or control issues in so many.

(climbing onto soapbox) I looked up all the houses on my street (there are a few of us who hang laundry, some (me) more than others) and the lowest evaluation is higher than what we paid for our house 8 years ago. Our house has almost doubled in value (triple if you count the land) so don't expect me to believe that hanging laundry brings down property values. Property values drop because people don't want to live there (crime, messy properties, traffic flow) and if seeing laundry on a clothesline is going to make or break them you don't want them in your neighborhood anyway! (getting down from soapbox)

NP