Archive: The Town That Tried to Ban Body Odor

From the TI archives — originally published September 2014.

In the fall of 2014, the town of Burien, Washington, became famous for an unusual municipal law: a trespass ordinance covering public spaces — the library, parks, City Hall — that made "offensive odor" and poor hygiene grounds for being removed.

Under the rules, visitors to public places were required not just to dress appropriately and use clean language, but to practice "good hygiene" so other patrons wouldn't be exposed to foul body odor. Violators could be trespassed: bans typically lasted a week, but repeat offenders could be barred from a public space for up to a year. "People will, unfortunately, have such a bodily odor that it's very hard for other patrons to be in that same space," City Manager Kamuron Gurol said at the time.

The 2014 TI piece treated it as an oddity. The deeper story was uglier: civil liberties advocates, including the ACLU, said the law's hygiene and dress provisions effectively criminalized homelessness, targeting people with no place to shower. Council members defending the law said it was a safety tool for the library and parks.

The backlash worked — at least partly. In 2015, Burien's council removed the controversial provisions that made having an offensive odor or not wearing shoes grounds for a ban. The trespass law itself survived (it was still being debated as recently as 2018), but the body-odor clause went down as one of America's most-mocked municipal experiments: a town that tried to legislate smell, and learned the hard way that odor is mostly a proxy for poverty.