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.
The paper, by the economists Taggert Brooks, Brad Humphreys, and Adam Nowak, takes advantage of a peculiar code change that occurred in Seattle in 2006. Back in 1988, the city enacted a one-year ban on new strip clubs that was renewed annually for 18 years. In 2005, a judge ruled that its auto-renewal was unconstitutional, and Seattle pols—wary of a boom in exotic dancing—overcompensated by proposing a referendum that would have required strip clubs to operate with supermarket lighting and strippers to stay at least four feet away from customers.
Naturally, that failed (by a 2-to-1 vote), and it was open season again for stripping in Seattle. Ever since, the turnover in the Seattle strip-club scene provided a good basis for studying the validity of “secondary effects.” One caveat: Equating “secondary effects” with home prices assumes that Seattle homebuyers, a few years into their jobs at, say, Amazon, Boeing, Starbucks, or Microsoft would factor crime and other externalities supposedly provoked by the presence of strip clubs into their offers. But that does seem like a reasonable assumption.
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.” But without proof of causation, cities have no right to infringe on dancing. Without the specter of these “secondary effects,” strip clubs would be subject to general zoning rules about bars, booze, and loud music.
For years, restrictions on strip clubs (and sex-toy shops and adult video stores) have been justified by slapdash municipal studies of their pernicious effects. “Early evidence put in front of the Supreme Court involved asking real estate agents what happened to the price,” says Brooks, the chairman of the economics department at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. “ ‘Oh, the prices goes down by 30 percent,’ they said. If you’re going to limit speech in this country, you’d think the burden of proof would be higher.
Instead, these kinds of businesses tend to be restricted until a judge rules otherwise—as happened in New York, in 2012, when a federal judge concluded that studies submitted to the court showed that “adult establishments” had no measurable effect on crime or property values, and that therefore, the city’s prohibitions violated the First Amendment. (Incidentally, one theory of strip club-as-crime magnet holds that patrons are “soft victims,” reluctant to call the police for fear of shame. This does not correspond to Slate’s acquaintance with strip club patrons.)
Brooks believes this type of research has implications beyond the neighborhoods open to dirty bookstores (which even Tom Waits used a symbol of a run-down area in his 1978 ballad, “Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis.”) It’s about the need to re-evaluate ungrounded perceptions of what actually affects home values. Brooks hypothesizes that attitudes toward strip clubs may have changed over time as pole dancing, and with it, the strip club, has become more normalized in American culture.
Times change; NIMBYism changes too. Yesterday’s stereotypes about what contributes and detracts from “quality of life” might not be true anymore.
