As Mayor Sam reports today, the LA TIMES has a story about how LA City Planners are reviewing a policy change to allow homeowners to advertise their home based businesses with signage.
“Under the original plan, anyone who held a city business license would have been eligible to erect a single sign of up to 9 square feet in their yards or multiple signs adding up to a total of 12 square feet.
Currently, no signs are allowed for home-based businesses.
City officials began considering a new sign ordinance after a 2004 Superior Court ruling that found the city’s current regulations to be “content-based” discrimination and an improper restraint on commercial speech.”
Homeowners groups strongly oppose the push to allow signs on homes.
We have seen a cancerous growth in psychic advertisements on houses throughout Los Angeles. If the law is changed to allow more advertising, we will live to see the day when billboards and neon pop up in the backyards of homes across LA.
Isn’t it funny how everything comes down to a legal question when any imbecile can see commercial signage in a residential area is destructive and truly degrading?
Here in Van Nuys 
Signs should be allowed but severely limited in size. As for people running psychic businesses out of their houses: considering that lawyers, dentists, accountants, and other professionals have long been given a free pass to run offices in residential areas, complete with client visits, it’s only fair to let psychics in on the act.
The real problem is zoning itself. The demand for separation of home and workplace is increasingly irrelevant in a city populated by members of cultures that do not traditionally engage in such functional segregation. Houston is routinely mocked for its unplanned nature–it zones for neither use nor bulk–but one of its great features is that neighbors can privately negotiate compensation agreements. In most cities, if a guy keeps chickens in his backyard, he’s violating zoning laws even if 9 of the 10 households on his block don’t care. In Houston, if that 1 busybody doesn’t want chickens being kept on his block, he’s gonna have to pay to make them go away. Add binding arbitration to this system and you have a much better dispute resolution mechanism than blanket bans on “undesirable” uses.
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Well, this clearly just foils my plan to work as a psychic advisor. And to think business was beginning to pick up. Sorry…it’s not everyday you get the opportunity to make cracks about working as a psychic.
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