"[My father] stretched every dollar to send me to a Catholic school to give me opportunities that he didn't have but, as DC got more and more expensive, he couldn't afford to hang in there," says White. "Now my father, who is the proudest Washingtonian you would ever meet, looks at DC from his balcony in Prince George's County."

From another interview:

The city is clearly thriving, but it is not difficult to see that there are a lot of people who are not thriving….

This city is still racially stratified, with Wards 5, 7 and 8 in particular, are still predominantly black, and many parts of the city, like Wards 2 and 3, are predominately white. And most other wards fall somewhere on that spectrum. So there are two DCs. There are people who are not seeing or feeling the emergent economy here, and frankly, that’s not necessary. It won’t happen accidentally. You won’t ever accidentally protect people.

***

I saw White at several small-scale neighborhood meetings in recent weeks, including one just ten days ago, when he and his near-full-term pregnant wife Christy, a SEC lawyer, spent a Friday evening talking with a dozen local voters (including me). After these sessions I thought: this is a guy I’d love to see in government. And: he probably doesn’t have a chance.

Even this afternoon, the Washington City Paper was was reporting that White faced tough odds. About the same time, I spoke with a senior city official who supported White but said, “I just don’t see how he can win.” So I cast my vote for him thinking: well, a higher losing total will still be a moral victory.

Yet when just now I got back into news-realm after an evening event, I see … that Robert White won! Narrowly to be sure, but a win is a win.

Technically it’s just the Democratic primary, but this is DC. And the city has big problems—as White said after the results came in, Now the hard part begins. But tonight’s results are a welcome surprise. Congratulations to Robert White and his team.

(Also, Hillary Clinton closed out the primary season with a very big win here.)

***

Which leads to the second update:  a fact sheet on which some of the DC-area efforts are based. You can read the full thing here, but for a sample:

Toxic pollution - Two-stroke engines, unlike increasingly cleaner car engines, burn an oil-gas mixture that generates high levels of ozone-forming chemicals. These engines also disperse fine particulate matter (“PM2.5”). These chemicals and PM2.5s are inhaled by equipment operators and passers-by. An authoritative, independent laboratory study showed that using a two-stoke gas-powered leaf blower for 30 minutes produces pollutants equal to those generated by driving a Ford F-150 truck 3,900 miles, or as far as from Texas to Alaska.

Harmful health impacts - Ozone and PM2.5s are well known causes of, or contributors to, early death, cardiovascular disease, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, premature births, and other serious health conditions. Even short-term exposure can be harmful…

Damaging noise - According to reports from federal agencies, noise from leaf blowers ranges from 102−115 decibels (“dBs”) at the ear of the operator. These same federal agencies have declared noise levels above 85 dBs to be harmful…. Health effects from noise alone can include heart disease. A recent study estimates that more than 100 million Americans are at risk for noise-related health problems, with over 145 million at potential risk of hypertension due to noise, and even more at an increased risk of heart attack.

More as election news, council news, and advancing-technology news develop.

A principal argument against any restrictions on powered landscape equipment, including the hyper-polluting, noisy leafblowers powered by two-stroke gas engines, is that they’re simply necessary for the hard work of coping with leaves and debris. Why would anyone want to make life more difficult for already hard-pressed people on the lawn crews?

The most obvious counter-argument on this social-justice front is that the cost of pristine-looking lawns is comparable to the cost of perfect-looking grapes or apples or tomatoes, back in the days before pesticide and herbicide regulations for farm workers. In each case, a vulnerable population was/is expected to work in dangerous circumstances for generally wealthier customers — until the rules began changing for farm workers, and should for landscape crews as well.

But there’s another counter to the “how could we possibly get the job done otherwise?” argument, which becomes more evident with each passing year. It is that a larger and larger share of the use of this equipment has become ritualized, even sumptuary and “conspicuous” (in the Thorstein Veblen sense), and has less and less to do with the basic task of removing heavy leaves.

The pattern that’s emerging is:

• To have a “nice” yard or office complex, you need a landscaping crew or contract with a landscaping company;
• To be a “serious” landscaping crew or company, you need modern equipment, and a regular weekly schedule of visits;
• So as part of the mark of seriousness and professionalism, the equipment gets put to work, needed or not. Thus what was an autumn-season only activity ten years ago is a round-the-year part of “professional” lawn care.

The two pictures on this page, both taken in this past early-springtime week, illustrate what I’m talking about. Springtime is the season of new growth, and bright budding leaves — not desicated old brown leaves tumbling from the trees. In the photo at the top, taken last week in an East Coast city (OK, Washington) you will not see even one leaf to be tidied up. Yet the crew member spent thirty minutes on the patch of lawn and flowers you see in this view. In those thirty minutes, as discussed before, he exposed himself to emissions the blower’s two-stroke engine comparable to a pickup truck driving 3,800 miles

The photo below, taken yesterday in a Southwestern city (OK, Dallas), shows something similar. Here too there were no leaves or debris to be moved, but two blower-operators, plus a supervisor, were on the job at this property for 20 minutes.

Some problems really are zero-sum, winner-vs.-loser struggles that leave some parties worse off. Fortunately this is not one of them, because of fast-developing technological alternatives, as we’ll describe in more detail soon.

***

By chance two weeks ago in Los Angeles I watched Mayor Garcetti, with Jack Dangermond of the Esri company (whom I describe in my current cover story), and they announced a new map-based, open-data initiative for the city. It is called GeoHub and is available here. Miguel Helft has an interesting Forbes story about the announcement, the initiative, and the participants.

Here were Dangermond (speaking) and Garcetti (seated) at the announcement last month, in a city-sponsored startup-incubator site in Los Angeles’s “Arts District.”

The WAMU story includes some other arguments, pro and con, about the legislation that D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh has introduced to speed the inevitable transition away from two-stroke gas blowers. (Inevitable? Yes: capital cities of nations like Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia are already phasing out these engines as unacceptably polluting. Sooner or later America’s capital will catch up. Also, the government-mandated use of ethanol in fuel, which is crazy from a public-policy perspective, has the additional effect of being very hard on two-stroke engines and makes them increasingly impractical.)

The weakest “con” argument in the report, for what it’s worth, is the claim by some lawn companies that if they can’t use two-stroke gas engines, they’ll stop doing business in D.C. There are already companies here using cleaner, dramatically quieter electric equipment. I’m sure they’d be happy with more business; and while people debate whether Say’s Law is true (“supply creates its own demand”), almost everyone agrees that demand creates supply. But listen to the report and see what you think.

***

Meanwhile, as a prelude to our upcoming American Futures report on the Maker Movement, and as yet another illustration of the Atlantic’s commitment to serving our readers, here’s a constructive seasonal suggestion about leafblower use. It explains how you can turn yours into a “snowball machine gun”:

Thanks to reader D.S. for this tip.

Now, the new developments: One is the latest story from a publication that has consistently done a good job of covering the merits, the economics, the scientific arguments, and the politics of the issue: the local Current newspapers in D.C.  The front-page story by Brady Holt in the latest issue, which you can see in a PDF here. It’s about the next steps the City Council may consider, and the forces pro and con.

The other is a story by Perry Stein in the Washington Post, which ran online last week and in the Sunday print paper yesterday. As Chris Bodenner summed up in a Note when the online version appeared, this article frames the leafblower issue as a personality story, in which the personality happens to be me. That wasn’t what I expected the story to be about when talking with the reporter, to put it mildly,  but this is life in the realm of Civic Engagement! The story does set out how and why my wife and I happened to become involved in an effort that a number of other people here locally had begun.

***

I’ve been away from the online world for quite a while, on a big push for a cover story in the March issue of the magazine. More about that anon, and on other topics starting later today. Thanks to those writing to ask whether I’d left to join the circus, keeled over, become a lama or a freight pilot, etc.

***

Also in recent press coverage is a letter in the latest issue of the Current newspapers (page 8 of the PDF here). It is from D.C. resident Joey Spatafora and addresses a local political figure who said he opposed any change in leafblower rules:

Multiple apartment complexes and an assisted-living facility nearby all employ landscaping contractors who use gasoline-powered leaf blowers for “general upkeep” of the grounds, in which they rarely — if ever — actually pick up anything. The leaf blowers are being used as a sort of gasoline- powered broom to “sweep” lawns, sidewalks, driveways — any surface that they want to “manicure.”

Nothing pierces the constant din of Connecticut Avenue traffic, trucks, ambulances, fire engines and accidents like a gasoline-powered leaf blower…. This is not the same quality of noise produced by lawn mowers, weed wackers, et cetera. This is a different spectrum and decibel level of sound. I do not believe that homeowners — or, more importantly, apartment complexes and landscaping companies that do business in D.C. — have the right to inject high-frequency, high-decibel noise into my apartment almost daily at such a level that I cannot even conduct a simple business phone call or concentrate on work.

There are reasonable, effective, community-friendly alternatives. Please talk to the maintenance staff at the Ponce de Leon and Parker House buildings on upper Connecticut Avenue, my heroes. The grounds manager there will talk to you about the benefits of low-noise electric leaf blowers — no spark plugs, gasoline, backpack or earplugs to hassle with, and just $70 at Lowe’s.

As mentioned throughout these reports, I originally was sensitized to leafblowers because of the noise, which like Spatafora I find uniquely disconcerting. But I decided it was worth trying to do something only when I learned about the public-health issues — and, crucially, the emergence of new, cleaner, quieter alternatives. We’ll let you know what comes next.

Believe it or not on the “seen but not heard” front, they are right. By (rarely enforced) Washington D.C. law, noise from leaf blowers cannot be more than 70 decibels, at a distance of 50 feet. Routinely with gas-powered blowers, the noise is five times louder than that, from five times farther away. (How do I know? We’ve measured.)

But yesterday a crew using two new BGA 100 blowers created noise only in the mid-50s decibel range, from a distance of 25 feet. Because the decibel scale, like the Richter scale, works logarithmically, this means that the noise was dramatically lower than conventional gas-powered blowers. (Technically it means that the “sound pressure level” was less than one-tenth as great). Over the years, from a writing office inside our house, I have been aware the instant leaf blowers start up in the surrounding blocks. Today I asked my wife Deb when the crew was going to turn their machines on — only to learn that they had been running in our front yard for the previous 20 minutes. I had not heard them start.

By safety regulations the crew members were required to wear protective glasses and to have their battery packs properly strapped on, which they did — but not required to wear ear protection, because it wasn’t needed. And of course there were no gas-engine fumes or emissions.

A D.C.-area lawn-care firm called A.I.R. had just bought a new set of the Stihl BGA 100 blowers and used them at our house. (It also is putting solar panels on the roof of its equipment truck, to re-charge the batteries.) Could these quiet blowers possibly be up to the job? We had a yardful of heavy, sodden leaves, and they got easily whooshed around like so:

Thank you, Stihl company! (This is not a sentence I had ever imagined myself writing.) And there’s even more good news from the industry. According to a trade publication, GreenIndustryPros,  Stihl says that the battery-innovation age is upon us. The article reported that the BGA 100 “is the lightest handheld blower, at 5.5 pounds, and is the quietest in the Stihl line at 56 [decibels].” It then quoted a Stihl senior product manager named Kent Hall:

“I think that you’re going to see more and more, industry wide, battery products being introduced into the market. It’s almost, as some people refer to it, a battery frenzy. Manufacturers have suddenly gotten caught up in this battery tsunami focus,” says Hall. “So I think you’re just going to see more and more existing companies expand their battery range, like Stihl has.”

Thank you, battery-technology innovators! Thank you A.I.R.! Yes, once more, thank you Stihl!! The arc of lawn care is long, but it bends away from two-stroke engines.

2. You mentioned that the absence of regulation means low-wage immigrant laborers are exposed to pollution. Has it ever occurred to suburban Republicans who hate immigrants worse than strychnine poisoning that there is a thing called supply and demand?

How many of them hire lawn services, which are probably the biggest single source of employment for Latin American male immigrants? In a decade or so, many of them will be filing for SSI disability payments based on occupational hearing loss (hearing protection is often nonexistent). And having a madly vibrating backpack blower strapped to one’s body several hours a day, day after day, will certainly cause neuromuscular disorders over time.

3. Whether commercial or do-it-yourself, does no one know how to operate the marvelous contrivance called a leaf rake anymore? It’s good exercise, and I find it is more efficient for gathering up leaves.

4. In the age of Amazon, the number of loud, diesel-powered delivery vans coursing through residential areas seems to have increased by an order of magnitude. A large van would seem to have ample space for an abundant battery pack. There is no reason why vans on a fixed itinerary could not be battery-electric powered.

5. The DOT-mandated back-up beepers of the commercial vehicles and construction vehicles (like Bobcats and backhoes) that have proliferated in suburbia are, in some instances, piercingly loud. I recall one case of a beeper that could be heard a half mile away. Back-up cameras and/or pedestrian avoidance systems could in some cases alleviate the noise problem. [JF note: ah, back-up beeps…..]

To test my hypothesis, I went on a two-mile walk this afternoon. It was impossible to be out of earshot of the racket generated by commercial landscaping services. These operations are creating externalities that we will pay for later, quite apart from their damage to tranquility and privacy.

***

For a different perspective, a reader who used to live outside Boston and now lives in further-north New England. She writes:

First, whether fall leaves will disintegrate over the winter and fertilize your lawn depends entirely on what kind of tree we're talking about, and maybe how cold your climate is.  Maple and even more so oak leaves are remarkably resistant to decomposition.  Leave a large quantity of either on your lawn and you'll have a matted mess in the spring and patches of no grass at all.  Even putting them in the compost is problematic.  And they can cause rot of the crowns of perennials if they're not pulled back early in spring.

Shredded, either by the lawnmower or a shredder that's at least as noisy as a blower, they're great stuff for mulch and compost, but by themselves, they're murder (at least in northern areas with real winters and snow cover and stuff).  So just leaving them be isn't as easy an option as it sounds in many cases.

Secondly, I'm guessing this won't be as much of a problem in your neighborhood, but in my old home town, an inner suburb of Boston , the attempt by some residents to get some simple regulation on hours of use blew up into a full-scale civil war in the town that raged for a couple of years between the long-time "townies" and the more recent, more "professional class" arrivals.

The townies took the side of the little landscaper outfits, who understandably wanted to be able to do their work in town at their convenience…. There had been, as in many gradually gentrifying suburban communities, simmering resentments between the two sides for many years, but this leaf-blower thing blew it wide open.  

I understand the neighborhood-cleavage potential. In our area, the natural axis would not be newcomer/previous resident but rather one based on working patterns. People who are at downtown offices all day, or often away on weekends, would be on one side. On the other, people at home with children, or working at home, or working nights, or retired, or disabled, or for other reasons present during the day.

This potential for ill-will is why I’ve stayed out of this issue until very recently. (While personally not liking the omnipresent noise, and not working at home any more because of it. I wrote a book in 1993 and another in 1996 mainly at my home office in Washington. The ones since then I’ve mainly written elsewhere.)

What’s changed recently, for me, is the evidence that these two-stroke gas-powered noisy leafblower engines really are an anomaly. Because of their inefficiency and hyper-polluting nature (30 minutes of leafblower use creates pollutants comparable to driving a pickup truck 3800 miles), they’ve been banned or phased out in most other uses. For more than a decade the EPA has been prohibiting them as boat motors. Motorcycle and scooter makers make very few any more. Countries like Thailand and Indonesia are trying to clean their air in part by getting rid of two-stroke engines (as explained here). They anachronistically persist in widespread first-world use mainly on lawn crews, which is bad for public health in general but most of all for the lawn-crew members themselves.

At the same time as legal and environmental momentum has increased against the dirty two-stroke engines, the electric alternatives have been becoming more plausible, thanks to improvements in battery technology and other innovations. The switch will come sooner or later, and in my view it is worth trying to nudge it along.