What the Future of Working at Home May Look Like
wsj.com
wsj.com
As someone who occasionally does work from home the biggest challenge was getting the rest of the family to treat you as being "at the office" even though you were in the office over the garage.
Which is to say that they're decided by the residents of an area who may not want delivery trucks to be clogging up the streets. This article had a number of innovative architectural designs but you can't just stick a workspace with employees in a residential area, especially if there's manufacturing involved.
Home/condo design for information workers working from home is a different matter. Although I'm not sure how much more complicated that is than having a good office space. There are pretty good solutions in most cities if the issue is having an occasional meeting.
Now, if you are talking about building entire factories next to your home, and changing a residential neighborhood to allow industrial, yes, that would be hard. And unwise on multiple levels. In those cases, again, talk to your city - you may be able to reverse the plan to get a residence allowed in an industrial area.
Really, most cities want to encourage business within them... you just need to be willing to make some calls, listen to feedback on your plans to be sure it doesn't negatively impact the neighbors, and do some paperwork.
I've been through this a few times. You familiarize yourself with the rules and file for a variance before you start working, assuming your town has zoning rules about this.
In my case, they were most interested in vehicular traffic and business visitors. My one neighbor made a big deal about an issue, and the zoning board ultimately decided in my favor.
I don't think an Uber or AirBnb flouting the rules in the interest of disruption is called for at all.
And things that shouldn't be a problem often aren't--until they are. I also got a couple of other things put in the purchase and sale agreement (as did he) that wouldn't be a problem with reasonable neighbors but could be with unreasonable ones.
And really, that "no by default" is what zoning laws are all about. City administration is only faulted for not preventing some land use that people will get up in arms about, so zoning laws are their set of hidebound insurance policies.
I think "It's a Wonderful Life" deserves a good deal of blame for this, because of how Capra illustrated the moral derangement of Bedford Falls becoming Potterville. Its main street was full of dime-a-dance saloons, floozy-filled nightclubs, billiard halls and pawn brokers. The implication was that any city with wise and moral leaders would have prevented it, which has struck fear into the heart of American cities ever since.
This is a surprising hypothesis. Do you have other evidence/analysis, or is this purely speculative?
For my part, I would have said that racism/classism deserves much of the blame. Especially after forced public school integration, middle-class whites wanted to live in neighborhoods where poor people would be priced out by inability to afford cars or detached houses (and kept out by racial criteria for home ownership), and thereby could also keep their local tax money from paying for services or infrastructure for “those people”.
That and multiple types of massive subsidies for cars and driving – zoning, free parking, government support for cheap oil, publicly developed roads, etc.
http://thepapercity.tumblr.com/post/42588584865/athfield-hou... http://citygallery.org.nz/news/house-ath-built
Which you are failing to do, thus the meta-discussion about your weird capitalization. Were your choices effective, no one would be mentioning it.
For one thing, nearly every example from TFA is of the owner living in in the workhome. Having employees live there would be an entirely different proposition.