Strip clubs POLL
The American city is built on the defense of home values by voters, politicians, and planners. It’s an instinctive defense, motivated by anecdote rather than research, but it shapes the way we live.
Take strip clubs. For half a century, American planners have devised municipal codes to restrict the locations of strip clubs and other “sexually oriented businesses,” fearing moral corrosion and neighborhood decline. The assumption that such establishments spawn “secondary effects,” a kind of halo of seediness, has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court four times as grounds to corral them—despite the First Amendment protection for dancing as a form of speech.
But new research shows that in and around Seattle—a city not known for its perversions or moral deficiencies—strip clubs have had no effect on residential property prices.
If there is more crime around strip clubs—and some research suggest that’s the case—it may well be because, in the words one such study, “the presence of these land uses are only tolerated in neighborhoods of social disorganization and lower social economic status that are already prone to high crime levels.”
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