The Four-Footed Menace Lurking in Our Sideyards

Larry Armor is a former Navy pilot and McDonnell Douglas engineer, so you know he’s an analytical thinker who’s dealt with plenty of brain-teasers in his 83 years.

He calls his latest challenge “Gridlock in the Side Yard.”

Perhaps not as catchy as “A Farewell to Arms” and at first blush maybe even sounding a little arcane, “Gridlock” is a five-paragraph recitation of what Armor considers a problem in fast-growing Orange County.

Armor sent The Times a copy of “Gridlock in the Side Yard.” Intrigued, I began reading.

“It is hoped the problem identified here, which has so far been undetected, will capture the attention of city managements and home builders,” Armor writes. “A solution is suggested.”

Armor lives in Westminster but earlier this year bought a house in a new housing tract in Yorba Linda. He’s now renting it but plans to move in himself next year.

Early on, however, he spotted trouble.

Namely, that modern-day homes typically include a sideyard next to the garage, “which becomes the logical sideyard for trash barrels. This side also becomes the side which is actively used for grass mowers, people or anything going from front to back. The other sideyard is blocked off and virtually never used.”

Squeezed because of the cost of land, builders typically want to put as many houses in a tract as possible, Armor says. To counter that, Orange County cities typically mandate 10 feet between homes, with each property having five feet as its sideyard.

Aha, Armor writes.

“Lot sizes have gotten smaller, creating narrow sideyards, while at the same time trash barrels have doubled in size. Unless you have at least a six-foot width, you cannot pass one trash barrel around another for emptying. Also, some lawn mowers cannot make it around the barrels.”

Result? That’s right: sideyard gridlock.

To get one trash container to the curb, you have to wheel all three of them out. That’s an unnecessary exercise, Armor says.

Armor’s solution: make one sideyard, the one used most often, six feet wide. The yard on the other side of the house, the one typically not used, could be reduced to four feet without causing a hardship.

I made a midday excursion to Yorba Linda to eyeball the problem. He’s right; there’s no way anyone could maneuver the three trash barrels around each other. If you want to move barrel No. 3, for example, to the front of the house, you’ve also got to wheel out barrels 1 and 2.

I’m no engineer, but I thought for a moment I thought of something Armor hadn’t, so I phoned him. Why not just fill up the barrel closest to the front gate and then work your way back to Nos. 2 and 3, so no maneuvering is required, I ask him.

Obviously a gentleman, he chuckles politely at my ignorance.

Each trash barrel has a specific function, he says.

“You have the dirty trash from the kitchen that goes in the black barrel, recyclables go in the green one and yard waste, like tree limbs and grass clippings, goes in the brown one,” he explains.

And because the containers are picked up on different days, it necessitates sometimes having to move one or two containers out of the way to get to the third.

The containers measure 31 1/2 inches across the top and stand about 4 feet high, Armor says. Two of them side-by-side would measure 63 inches across and can’t be moved around each other in a 5-foot-wide corridor.

“And if you have a couple bicycles there too, it’s true gridlock,” Armor adds.

Pat Haley, the city’s community development director, says Armor has a point. She takes it so seriously, she says, that when the city revises its zoning ordinances in the next year or so, it will consider Armor’s proposal.

“What’s happening, really,” Haley says, “is not that the side setback is too small, it’s that the trash cans are too big. You have automated trash pickup and you get these huge multi-gallon containers, they’re behemoths, and they don’t quite fit in the sideyard very well.”

In “Gridlock,” Armor supports the large trash containers.

“Do not take away those beautiful large trash barrels because they are a part of the modern mechanized trash collection system,” he writes. “The people who created this system are the silent heroes for the communities which have adopted it.”

Armor figures he’s done all he can: identify the problem and offer a solution.

“I do a little inventing,” he says, as we wrap up our conversation. “I have a patent application in for a foot-operated lid-lifter for these types of barrels.”

I have a feeling it just might work.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com