What if a neighbor allowed homeless to camp in front of their house?
Seems like the issue is the store owner (i.e. the neighbor), not the fact that it is a store.
When I lived in Houston I used to jog past a house where the front yard was absolutely covered in garbage. Super nice neighborhood and all the houses in the neighborhood looked great, but just this one guy clearly had issues. It smelled horrendous.
>What if a neighbor allowed homeless to camp in front of their house?
People keep writing this, obviously, without thinking even for a minute.
A neighbor who allowed homeless camp in front of their house would:
1) have to live behind a homeless camp himself
2) be tanking his own house value
3) be open to sanctions from the code as there are way more restrictions on residential property use than there are on commercial.
>When I lived in Houston
Your experience in Houston, where there is no zoning, is not very irrelevant in discussion of zoning, don't you think? Unless you are actually making an example why zoning is important, of course.
1) the business owner has to operate a business behind the camp
2) the business owner tanks the value of their own property
3) what code? The building code? If we can apply a “code” to a home, then we can apply it to a business. So if there really is such a disparity where you live, the issue is that disparity in application of building codes, not zoning laws.
Re: Houston, what does zoning have to do with anything? My story could have happened i”anywhere. Zoning doesn’t control whether you are allowed to cover your property with trash. My point is that even in an area with nothing but houses, you can have horrendous neighbors.
Not at all. There are tons of businesses next to homeless camps in every American city, and the value of a business is not in the building but in the location and zoning, the code is the city code attached to zoning, the thing you don't have in Huston. The zoning for a residential and commercial is different thus you cannot apply residential zoning to commercial and vice versa.
There is no place in the world that is zoned for homeless encampments. Zoning is stuff like residential, commercial, industrial, mixed use, and so on. If you are talking about homeless encampments, it’s not a zoning discussion.
I don’t support homeless encampments. Out here where I live in California they tend to be on public land like parks. But wherever they are, there should be laws, enforcement mechanisms, and social support to deal with them. But none of those things have anything to do with zoning.
I think you are confused. Zoning is not words, zoning is a set of regulations. There is no zoning for an Indian restaurant yet you can open one in a commercial lot and can't in a residential or agricultural. Same with homeless camps: there is no specific zoning for a homeless camp only but they are much easier to keep in commercial lots than residential, where it will immediately run into occupancy limits, impervious cover, trash and other restrictions.
Where do you live? Where I live, the overnight occupancy limit for commercial zoning is 0 people, so (at least here) your comment makes no sense. I think commercial zoning that allows anyone to live on the property is basically rare. So if you live in a weird place where its ok for people to live on commercial zoned property, then I agree, that is super weird. But if not, then your issue is just enforcement. In which case, yea I agree, laws should be enforced, but again that has nothing to do with zoning.
I doubt very much there is any place in the US where overnight occupancy is 0 for a commercial property. Where I live you can have a 24 hour business. Living in commercial property is forbidden, but what exactly is living is up to the code officer. In my case the officer decided that homeless did not live there but just visited the business.
Ok by why does the code officer enforce the zoning code in residential zones but not the commercial ones? It’s not like anyone doing their job in good faith could confuse a business patron and someone camping out in a parking lot.
Seems like your code officer is obviously crooked. Not sure what that has to do with zoning though.
Camping in front of business is not against the code, people used to do that for big movie openings or for other commercial events some time ago. With the residential property there are actual overnight occupancy limits which are easy to show being violated. And the occupancy is just one of the codes which would be easy to prove violated by a camp on a residential property, there are tons of other codes. Where I live, you cannot replace an exterior door without a permit, while the commercial zoning is much more permissive.
Don't punish/restrict responsible people for a problem caused by an irresponsible person.
Fix the irresponsible behavior directly.
Most residential codes define minimum living standards, and as a result people camping/crashing on a property whose structure they don't live in, is prohibited.
Apparently your zone code needs to be corrected. Small businesses in residential areas need to be held to relevant/responsible residential zone code.
(You are proposing a zoning code fix too, but for reasons I don't understand, seem fixated on eliminating non-offending businesses, instead of directly addressing the problem.)
I am glad that going directly after illegal behavior is an option for you but I live in a blue city, where DA practices "restorative justice" and the mayor allowed homeless to camp everywhere by a decree (it took a referendum and numerous lawsuits to remove giant camps he created out of downtown, they are still free to camp in residential areas despite the referendum explicitly forbidding that on top of the city and state laws to the safe effect). Nobody gets ticketed for noise, the "defund police" campaign from 2020 ended with the police not even enforcing traffic anymore so nobody is holding small business responsible.
Seems like the issue is the store owner (i.e. the neighbor), not the fact that it is a store.
When I lived in Houston I used to jog past a house where the front yard was absolutely covered in garbage. Super nice neighborhood and all the houses in the neighborhood looked great, but just this one guy clearly had issues. It smelled horrendous.
Anyway, seems unrelated to it being a store.