4th Circuit upholds N.C. city’s SOB law
The First Amendment Center reports:
Adult businesses are not entitled to challenge whether they cause adverse effects in their neighborhoods after a new zoning law has been enacted, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The ruling by a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel means that even if an adult business that opened before a zoning change does not cause harmful community effects for a period of years, it has little if any First Amendment recourse once the zoning law has gone into effect
The opinion in Independence News v. City of Charlotte is available here. An excerpt:
Where, as here, a zoning ordinance legitimately targets secondary effects, it would make little sense to then require the ZBA to consider evidence that a particular adult establishment is not currently generating adverse secondary effects when deciding whether to grant that establishment a variance. In such a case, there is no assurance that the adult establishment will not begin to generate secondary effects in the future. And, if a variance were granted because an establishment is not now generating secondary effects, rather than because physical conditions provide an adequate buffer against any secondary effects that might be generated in the future, there would be no mechanism for addressing those effects if and when they began to occur.
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