Northampton’s City Council approved all three adult-use ordinances under consideration at tonight’s public meeting. These ordinances regulate signage with adult content, require a 500-foot buffer zone between shops with porn viewing booths and homes/schools/houses of worship, and require a similar 500-foot buffer zone between large adult enterprises and homes/schools/houses of worship. A large adult enterprise […]
Ordinances and Regulations
New York City Porn Shops Depress Demand for Neighboring Properties
From The New York Times, “Sex-Related Shops Make Comeback Near Times Sq.”, 3/15/05… Ten years after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared war on Times Square’s X-rated peep shows, strip joints and video stores, shops selling sexually explicit materials have slowly begun to creep back into the area, adroitly exploiting loopholes in the law–and property-owners’ demand […]
California Supreme Court Ruling Helps Communities Preserve Quality of Life While Leaving Room for Free Expression
This California court ruling is a bit old (1989), but it strikes an appealing balance between community interests and free expression… The state Supreme Court on Thursday gave local governments more power to use “porn zoning” laws to restrict the location of theaters that show sexually explicit movies.In a widely watched test of municipal authority, […]
Even Hollywood Moved to Crack Down on Its Adult Businesses
Even Hollywood, hardly a center of conservative prudishness, years ago decided stricter adult-use zoning was in order… City and law enforcement officials long ago concluded that much of the prostitution, lewd behavior and other crime as well as the general seediness that plagues Hollywood emanates from the concentration of pornography shops in the area. Now, […]
Barney Frank: Zoning Balances First Amendment with Community Concerns
The Washington Post (1995) writes about Boston’s experience with zoning sex shops… …Barney Frank, now one of the most quotable leaders of the House Democratic minority…had been elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1972, representing part of downtown Boston. A short time later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities could not ban sex-related businesses, but […]
Gazette: “Capital Video tries another tack”
Today’s Gazette reports… The tug-of-war between the city and Capital Video Corp. intensified Tuesday after the Cranston, R.I.-based company filed new plans that could trigger a zoning freeze just as the city is poised to consider regulating porn shops.The latest filing with the city’s planning department involves what are called ‘approval not required’ plans. City […]
Key Adult Use Ordinance Weakened – Urgent Citizen Action Needed
Northampton’s proposed new adult use ordinances made it out of the Economic Development Housing & Land Use Committee (EDHLU) meeting yesterday, but not without being weakened. NoPornNorthampton is concerned about these two changes:1) Adjacent aisles no longer count towards the 1,000 square-foot threshold of adult material on display. The intent of the original ordinance was […]
A Review of Sherry Lee Short, “Making hay while the sun shines: The dynamics of rural strip clubs in the American Upper Midwest, and the community response”
NPN’s Jendi Reiter reviews an essay by Sherry Lee Short, “Making hay while the sun shines: The dynamics of rural strip clubs in the American Upper Midwest, and the community response”. This essay is published in Christine Stark & Rebecca Whisnant, eds., Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography (North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, […]
Officials in Fairfax County, Virginia Regret Adult Zoning Loophole
Leave a hole in your zoning ordinance and you might regret it later. The Washington Post reports from Fairfax County: [T]o some of its neighbors and many county officials, MVC Latenight is an offensive eyesore in a town struggling to revitalize its historic center. The adults-only business that sells a variety of videos and sex […]
Not All Happy with Porn Shops in Greenwich Village
Peter Brooks from Talk Back Northampton asserted in a recent Northampton City Council meeting that the residents of Greenwich Village in New York coexist happily with their sex shops. The New York Times reports this isn’t completely true: At a recent community meeting in the Village, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was pelted for more than […]