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10 Planning May 1999 . Home Bodies Zoning rushes to catch up with home- based businesses. By Julie Bennett After years of liv- ing in fear of zon- ing officials, Stanley and Maria Janusz have found nirvana, a one-mile-square community on the New Jersey shore where home occupations are loosely regulated by eight lines in the local zoning code. Of the 12 houses on the Januszes' block on Chestnut Avenue in Island Heights, New Jersey, five are occupied by individuals who work full-time at home: a potter, a mason, an Amway saleswoman, a title re- searcher, and theJanuszes, who - -- p p L R viduals were working at home in 1997, when the bureau com- pleted its last Current Popula- tion Survey of home-based busi- nesses. About half of these provide services to other busi- nesses or individuals. Another two-fifths, or 1.7 million work- ers, are managers or profes- sionals, while the remaining home-based workers are in con- struction or the retail trades. The number of people work- ing at home is growing. "Today's technology is mak. ing it easier and easier to run an entire primary business or a satellite office from home," says Steven Elrod, a Chicago attorney with Burke, Weaver & Prell who acts as counsel to several Illinois municipalities. As every planner knows, today's residential neighbor- hoods were not designed for such enterprises. "We have businesses sprouting where they were never intended to be,' Elrod says. Residential streets are generally not wide __________ __.___ __u__ A A N C N T cur behind picket fences. Elrod says that even seem. ingly innocuous home-based businesses can cause problems: "In one community, we had a young mother creating designs for bibs and baby clothes. When she installed a huge screen- printing press in her basement, noise and toxins drifted into her neighbors' backyards.' Old laws, new businesses Zoning laws written in the 1940s and 1950s that allow only doctors, dentists, lawyers, milliners, and dressmakers to work from home have their own down side for today's telecommuters. When Stanley and Maria Janusz started their business in a rented bunga- --- ?F~T]~ -- I I N G C E > \ I qq low in another New Jersey town, they did so in violation of local zoning laws. "No clients ever came to our house, we had no sign on the door, and we used a post office box to cut down on home deliveries,' Janusz says. "But if someone who had to com- mute 100 miles a day didn't like the idea of our working at home, all he had to do was call up the zoning board and put us out of business.' All across the country, cit- ies are pushing to correct home- based business disparities. Elrod, who lectures attorneys nationwide on the subject, urges communities to write zoning regulations that allow home occupations so long as Stal/ley (11/{11\l1/t.it, jw,usz and La[lrie anti Richard ,\lallct) I.