The Court has generally upheld restrictive zoning laws targeted at sexually themed businesses. The usual rationale, though, has been that the business attracts unsavory clients who then misbehave — for instance, patronize prostitutes nearby — or whose very presence tends to drive down property values.
Here’s an interesting twist, reported by the Miami Herald (thanks to BNA’s Internet Law News for the pointer):
Miami’s Code Enforcement Board ruled late Monday that Phillip Bleicher’s Flava Works, an Internet porn production and distribution company, is illegally running an adult entertainment business out of a single-family home at 503 NE 27th St. — zoned for residential use — and ordered that those operations cease….
The website is CocoDorm.com, where visitors can, for a fee, watch live video streams from the Edgewater house, where chiseled young males are paid $1,200, plus room, board and meals, to live in the two-story home for a month and have sex with each other on schedule….
Assistant City Attorney Victoria Mendez argued that Bleicher also was running an illegal rooming house, but that violation was dismissed….
[Flava Works lawyer James Benjamin] argued that business transactions don’t happen at the house …. “No member of the public came to the location to view, buy, trade or obtain any adult entertainment,” Benjamin said.
But Mariano Loret de Mola, the city’s director of code enforcement, testified that, on one occasion, he saw a man he recognized as “Dorm Dude” Breion, who is prominently featured on the website’s main page, walk up to the Edgewater house and punch in a code to let himself in….
It turns out that in 2001, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had held a Tampa ordinance inapplicable to a similar Web site, but the board apparently took the view that the Tampa ordinance and the Miami ordinance were different enough to justify a different result here.