Green thumb war

When Charles Leak and his wife purchased his home in East Hampton, they thought they’d found an oasis of quiet. Far away from their Tribeca apartment in the Near Northwest Woods, a neighborhood known for its secluded calm, their contemporary saltbox style sits back on a one-acre lot, surrounded by Japanese cedars and bamboo.

About five years after he moved in, the leaf blower roars started.

“You know what a chainsaw sounds like? These are louder. Usually, there are multiple. It becomes a symphony,” Leak, who has worked as a contractor and a fine artist, tells me. “It’s quieter in the city.”

Leak and many other East Hampton residents say leaf blowers have instilled a reign of terror in their idyllic hamlet, home to the summer estates of billionaires like Barry Rosenstein and Len Blavatnik. They’re far from alone. From Palm Beach to Aspen, homeowners say they’re being plagued by the near-constant hum and toxic hiss of these motorized monsters. Most commercial blowers burn a mixture of oil and gas and release as much as 30% of their unburned fuel into the air. And they’re not just whirring in the spring. With wealthy homeowners hungry for bigger lawns and ultra-manicured landscaping, more homes have hired weekly or twice-weekly crews, year-round.

Driving down his street, Leak points out each house and its noisiness. One property’s owner employs landscapers who work until 8 p.m.; another has multiple leaf blowers running at once.

“We should have bought it way back just to keep it quiet,” he says, pointing to the neighboring lot. Leak, who eschews traditional grass in favor of moss, has his landscaper use good old-fashioned rakes and gives a $200 tip for the extra effort.

How do we get people to stop thinking of their lawn as their living room rug?Edwina von Gal, landscape designer

His neighbors have organized against the cacophony. The pages of The East Hampton Star are riddled with articles and letters to the editor about the issue. In East Hampton, gas leaf blowers have been prohibited between May 20 and September 20 since 2021, but local groups say the enforcement is virtually nonexistent. The town’s ordinance enforcement department received 140 calls related to leaf blowers last year, and 133 the year prior.

Now, some are pushing for a year-round ban on gas-powered blowers. It would be a costly switch. Customers, no matter how rich, don’t want to swallow a price increase by switching to pricier electric blowers, local landscapers say, and with private equity firms hoovering up mom-and-pop landscaping shops, the bottom line is emphasized now more than ever.

Across America, leaf blowers have become a political lightning rod: More than 200 cities and several states have issued bans or restrictions on gas-powered leaf blowers. The pursuits of two different bourgeois dreams — a perfect lawn or quietude — are at war.

“It’s about privilege and what constitutes privilege these days,” says Setha Low, an East Hampton homeowner and anthropology professor at the City University of New York. “Very wealthy people want to control their environment.”

Even on a rainy day in May, East Hampton’s landscapers are busy prepping for the summer season. Their trucks are all over town, stopped at red lights in front of the Louis Vuitton and Prada stores, and parked by eight- and nine-figure mansions.

Outside Town Hall, Gail Pellet shows off a pollinator garden she and her husband, Stephan Van Dam, have tended through the ChangeHampton, an ecological organization they run together. In between pointing out flower species, she stops person after person to mention the group’s latest initiative: abolishing gas leaf blowers for good.

Everyone has an opinion: “They’re disgusting and ridiculous,” says one resident. “We can’t enjoy this beautiful place,” says another.

Several residents say COVID-19 was when the clamor got unbearable. Summer and weekend people who migrated east to ride out the pandemic became exposed to the cacophony of spring and fall, when heavy-duty landscaping takes place. Trying to work, socialize, or think became impossible.

“We all became driven insane by this noise,” Pellet says.

One of Van Dam’s favorite things about his time in East Hampton is access to Three Mile Harbor, where he swims every morning. Except on certain Thursdays, one of the busiest days for landscapers as they prep for weekend residents. The noise becomes intolerable, and the water turns murky.

“They come in like a hovercraft for an hour and a half. The noise. The dust,” he says.

A few summers ago, the blowers woke him up from a late summer nap. “I was so incensed,” he says. “I ran over there and told the owner to shut them up.”

Drive down Further Lane, where houses sell for upward of $100 million, and you’ll see lawns so pristine they look like carpeting. That’s exactly the problem, says Edwina von Gal, a landscape designer who has lived and worked in East Hampton for decades.

“How do we get people to stop thinking of their lawn as their living room rug?” she says, is among the questions that now inform her practice, which focuses on ecological land care and the cultivation of native species.

For years, before leaf blowers were common, von Gal designed what her clients wanted: the bright green lawns they saw in magazines. The richer the Hamptons got, she says, the bigger and smoother the lawns got. “It’s a symbol of wealth and control. It’s equating size with money and uniformity with money,” she says.

Achieving that putting green-style perfection requires chemical sprays, the destruction of naturally occurring vegetation, and a cavalcade of leaf blowers.

“They just want to make sure it’s all looking good when they come out,” Jeff Peters, who has been a landscaper in the Hamptons for decades, said. “God forbid if not.”

Peters, who was using an electric leaf blower so quiet I couldn’t hear it through the phone when we spoke ahead of Memorial Day weekend, charges his clients as much as $60,000 a year for planting, maintenance, and cutting. When they arrive after a traffic-riddled Jitney ride, they want it to look like they’re getting their money’s worth.

Hamptons residents also want to get their money’s worth for solitude. The wealthy “don’t want any kind of intrusion,” Low says, and that includes sound.

“Here in East Hampton, the regime is a very, very, very elite white kind of culture,” which is a culture of silence, she says. “No leaf blowers; you don’t want to hear construction. You don’t want to hear work.”

Beyond East Hampton, leaf blowers have become a pet issue of libertarians across America. In March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reversed a gas leaf blower ban across the state.

“I like gas-powered better,” he said after signing the bill into law. “And if that’s what you believe, then you should be able to do that.”

“They’re making it a partisan issue,” Pellet says.

So far, her organization’s petition to ban gas leaf blowers year-round in East Hampton has received close to 400 signatures; she’ll make another push for signatures when the seasonal ban ends in the fall. But not everyone in the community is supportive.

An Instagram post about the petition from The East Hampton Star received 618 comments — more than nearly every other post from the local newspaper since. Many of them flagged the high costs the ban would entail.

54% of landscapers say they’ve been approached about selling their company in the past 12 months.

Electric-powered professional-grade leaf blowers from outdoor tool manufacturer Husqvarna retail for between $310 and $500. Add in the charger and a battery, and it comes to nearly $1,800. The company’s gas-powered, professional-grade blowers start at $300 and max out at just under $900. Landscapers say they also have to buy extra batteries, which last about an hour and a half, and pay for outfitting a trailer with chargers and a generator.

“It’s getting to the point now that maybe in a couple years I would say screw it, it’s not worth it,” Peters says.

For the past two decades, private equity shops have been buying up local landscaping businesses, collecting lucrative recurring revenue. In Lawn & Landscape Magazine’s annual industry survey last year, 54% of respondents said they’d been approached about selling their company in the past 12 months.

“The services are recurring, your grass continues to grow,” Robert Tymowski, a managing director at Livingstone Partners, tells me. When it comes to leaf blowing, he says there is little reason to switch to electric: “You really don’t have an economic incentive to care about your customer’s neighbor necessarily.” He noted that he uses an electric blower on his own property.

“There’s kind of a misincentive or misalignment between the costs associated with going with a quieter solution and also just the, call it the quality of the work,” he adds, citing the need for batteries and chargers and the reduced power of electric blowers. “There’s a number of things happening there, but they kind of all conspire against making a pivot to the quieter technology.”

Following the law would be one incentive.

While the larger and more established landscapers in East Hampton tend to adhere to the summer ban, many of the smaller ones don’t, locals say. That leaves rule-following shops like Peters’ at a competitive disadvantage, as they have to charge customers more to adopt the technology that adheres to the rules.

Better enforcement could solve that. The East Hampton law states that violating the ban could result in suspension or revocation of licenses and fines up to $5,000.

East Hampton residents say oversight is nonexistent. Code enforcement typically shows up well after the violating party has left, some say, and that’s only if you manage to reach something.

“They’re already done and gone, so that doesn’t work,” Leak says, “Then when you call them to complain about it, they start to get this attitude that you’re like some kind of crazy radical.”

Many would like to see the homeowners shouldering the burden of the fines and more extreme repercussions. Pellet suggested that neighbors should be able to videotape violators to report them in a sort of vigilante justice — or at least send them to journalists.

On the morning of May 20, the day East Hampton’s seasonal ban went into effect, Leak took a video of his property. Drowning out the bird chirps was the hum of a leaf blower.

Madeline Berg is a correspondent at Business Insider, where she covers the wealthy, famous, and powerful.