It’s a strange story: A federal judge siding with the sex industry has temporarily blocked the city from enforcing restrictive 2001 zoning regulations that never went into effect in the first place, but that the state’s highest court blessed as perfectly kosher.
The city should appeal to win the right to hem in these businesses if they ever again become a public nuisance — with the understanding that strip clubs, bookstores and peepshows are hardly the scourge they were when the fight began.
The tale began 18 long years ago, when the Giuliani administration ushered in new rules to push to the fringes seedy adult businesses that back then spread like a bad STD across swaths of New York. Though under 1995 regulations they’d been barred from being within 500 feet of schools, houses of worship or one another, the city saw shops exploiting a loophole — proclaiming themselves only 40% adult business, and therefore not subject to the prohibition — and moved to clamp down.
Tied up in court from the get-go, the revised rules have never been enforced. But adult stores have suffered extreme shrinkage anyway. The internet did damage. The improvement of more and more neighborhoods did more.
In a decision this week, Manhattan Federal Judge William Pauley said the 2001 rules seemed so restrictive, they’d likely constitute an unconstitutional ban on protected speech if put in place today.
Unlikely. We strongly suspect that there’d still be plenty of places to park a strip club in a city of 302 square miles. (Let’s see a map, City Planning.)
The city should keep fighting for the right to require these businesses to be properly sited. But it should do so with its eyes wide open: This is not the hardcore fight it once was. Not even close.
![In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1820955015.jpg?w=490 "In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]")
