The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Take laundry, for instance.

When it comes to so-called delicates I am a proponent of plucking them from the washer and placing them on a clothesline in the basement of our Edgewater home to dry au natural. Truth be known, I always have favored the way an air-dried shirt feels, preferring all of my Polos or Izods to dry naturally along with the linens I sport through for the two or so warm months that the Chicago real estate market annually experiences.

And in so doing it as if we hearken back to 1950's style sit-coms where domestic chores ended with the damp laundry being pinned up in the backyard for the sun to dry and the world to see.

It seems innocuous enough, a line with which to dry clothing naturally. It also integrates nicely into the country's growing green sentiment, reducing the electricity or gas needed to rev up the machinery to mechanically dry clothing. And so we have Jack Johnson's  jingle from The Recycling Song urging us to reuse, reduce and recycle.

But beauty (or utility) to some is an eyesore to another.

An article in today's New York Times talked about the desire by some folks across the country to go old school and line-dry their clothes. But in a number of instances there were rules and regs declaring that such simple measures were against the rules. A couple of interesting scenarios were described in the article, but what caught my eye was a comment from another real estate professional who lamented the placement of a clothesline next to her single family home listing.

According to the realtor she was unable to sell a beautifully restored Victorian home in Richmond because it looked out onto a neighbor’s laundry hanging from a second-story back porch. In June, she added, the house went into foreclosure.

Wow, so the housing market has another intractable foe, hanging laundry.

I've never been a huge fan of hanging out dirty laundry (metaphorically), but the inability to sell a home likely isn't predicated on laundry hanging next store, it's a combination of the home's price and the performance of the localized market. Sure, there will be variances. But in large part the chief elements in today's market, the Chicago real estate market included, are the two I just mentioned.

So, dear reader of The Real Estate Lounge Chicago blog, don't expect me to sully someone's drying clothes as the reason a Lakeview condo won't sell or an Andersonville condo doesn't show. More likely primarily it is the combination of price with consumer confidence.

The good news is that for the past few months efforts have been paying off with increased sales in some of Chicago's more popular neighborhoods. At the same time legislators in a variety of municipalities are urging the collective consciousness toward a greener place by striking down covenants and such that disallow a fellow from putting his shirt on a clothesline on his property to dry.

Ah, the return of sensibility. Let's hope it lasts.

By the way, yesterday we headed an hour or so out of town to splotch through a muddy pumpkin patch. The pictures above captured Jackson and Lucas at various stages of participation of a day more like end of autumn than its more hospitable beginning. Brr. An harbinger of things to come?