Your Home Office Might Be Illegal
(Source: Unsplash/Windows.)
Planners are really good at making simple things complex. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans learned what it meant to have a home office. The kitchen table, spare bedroom, or den transformed into our new offices in our homes—an experience that created a growing number of people interested in working from home. Count on the American Planning Association to make this simple concept overly complex.
For the uninitiated, you may not be aware of the volumes of zoning policy that has been written and adopted to “protect” your house from all of the functions of the city. Cities across North America have adopted regulations to separate various land uses, a key feature of the artificially spread-out suburban development pattern. Conventional zoning has intentionally separated where we live from where we work. This makes sense when we are talking about separating noisy and smelly industrial uses, but what about office or administrative work? Conventional zoning fails to recognize the differences in the actual impact of these uses.
Running a business out of your home is defined by planners as a “Home Occupation”—and they’ve further walked this definition through a gauntlet of other planning and complicated zoning codes and terms in their orderly pursuit to protect the public. Your zoning code likely describes you as an occupant of the dwelling, and codifies who can participate in at-home work through an awkward—dare say I outdated—description of nuclear relationships to describe employees. They may employ an ambiguous requirement that your home office will not change the character of your neighborhood, which is completely subjective to the whim of the planner. Finally, in the best of all technical brush-offs for the planners who don’t want to deal with you, they may simply state that a Home Occupation is not a listed use, and therefore not permitted.
According to the United States Census, prior to the pandemic, approximately half of all businesses in the U.S. were home based and nearly eight million people worked primarily from home.
The frontline zoning battle for the right to work out of your home hit center stage during COVID. Under most zoning codes, we are all breaking the law. Through the mind of the planner, an office is a distinct use that needs to be in a bubble wrapped with a landscape buffer far away from a house. Your home is locked in regulatory amber, and cannot evolve without investigation and review. When you step out of the planner's mind, you realize that many, many, many, people can work from home, and the heavens will not come crashing down because of it.
For the past three years, we have adapted incrementally from the bottom up. Our communities have undertaken many small steps to adapt to the current conditions. Cities empowered staff to use discretionary authority, and zoning codes were relaxed or ignored. As citizens, we also adapted. Working from home and working out of a home has become normalized. Many of us, including myself, made many small bets such as investing in our homes to build a proper home office. Others have even taken the next incremental step of leaving a corporate job to open a new business in our homes.
We can observe the result of these small bets. In my community, our city began to repopulate during the day. The normalization of remote working resulted in commuters having several days a week where they are at home, and on those days they are visible on main street. It has also inspired a whole new army of start-ups where people are leaving the flagship company and opening their own boutique brand. The economic impact of these shifts is significant.
However, while the entrepreneurial spirits leveraged the real estate of their home to open a business, cities have been slow to codify these practices. In some cases, cities have begun the process to enforce these zoning rules, making working from home illegal. The results are not good, and in states like Florida, the legislature is stepping in, stripping away the ability of cities to make decisions at the local level.
It’s time to step back. The default response of planners to this problem is to apply an even more complicated system to explain and revise an already complicated system. The American Planning Association (APA) has compiled volumes of documents and reports on home occupations, ostensibly to “help” planners process the changes in their communities that the pandemic brought about.
While I do appreciate the research and examples, I am not sure it takes a handful of PhD researchers to address this struggle. I also do not believe this is a struggle that requires legislative action from the state or federal government, who have more critical legislative priorities and could not possibly craft legislation to address every local need.
The characteristics of a Home Occupation can be quite simple, allowing for the incremental step of home-based work that over half the businesses in the United States have already taken.
Home Occupations should be permitted by right in every zoning category in your community. Whether you are working remotely for a large corporation or running your own business, you should have the right to do this within your home. Cities should encourage home occupations as a tenet of their economic development strategy, and a single line could be added to any code to focus the planners.
If additional instructions are required, or your community is fearful that their neighbors will become overtaken with an entrepreneurial spirit, there are four questions that can be asked to calm those fears. If the answer is yes to these, move directly to Go, and encourage that business owner to invest in your community.
Is the home business only using part of the house? In more technical terms, is the home occupation accessory or smaller than the living areas? For those who prefer math, if your house is 2,000 square feet, one room or 100 square feet is dedicated to the business.
Are all the things needed for the business within the house? No stock piles of materials or truck parking on the property?
Are there two or fewer on-site employees who do not reside on the property? Pick a number, any number. The purpose of this is to acknowledge that a home business is not going to be a 50-person call center, just the basic office staff.
Will you have on average five or fewer customer visits? This requirement is intended to alleviate the fear that a restaurant or grocery store will move into a house. By picking a number that is less than the daily trips to a grocery store, but enough for a realtor or lawyer to have clients, we can calm the fears of the neighbors.
If the answers are “yes” to all of these questions, do everything in your authority to support this entrepreneur to proceed. A “no” to any question, and the proposal can be further reviewed by the city—we do not need to focus on hyper-regulation or complicated applications. Allowing the next increment of development strengthens our economy and our neighborhoods.
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Edward Erfurt is the Director of Community Action at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.