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In the Plaza-Midwood section of Charlotte, North Carolina, Central Avenue Video and News has been operating since the mid-1990s in open violation of a local zoning ordinance relegating adult businesses to industrial no-man's-lands. The 1994 ordinance gave pre-existing sex shops and pornographic bookstores until 2002 to move to sites not less than 1500 feet away from churches, schools, and residential buildings.

The problem is that in Charlotte, such sites are nearly nonexistent. As the move-or-close deadline loomed five years ago, Central Avenue Video joined forces with four other adult businesses to sue the City of Charlotte, seeking to overturn the zoning regulation, amend it, or at least buy time. The plaintiffs claim that such zoning restrictions in a city unable to provide enough legal locations amounted to a clear attempt to run them out of town. The ordinance remains unenforceable pending the suit's final outcome. In 2006, a judge issued a partial ruling favorable to the City of Charlotte, but the rest of the case goes to trial in federal court this November.

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eanwhile, John McMillan, who owns Central Avenue Video and a second adult business within the city limits of Charlotte, has applied for a zoning variance so that he can move the Central Avenue store to an outlying area adjacent to a truck depot. The problem with the new location -- a storefront property at 6829 Statesville Road -- is that there are four private homes within 1500 feet.

Led by homeowner Larry Johnson, local residents have balked at the prospect of having a porn shop in their neighborhood. Informed of the intended move by the City of Charlotte, Johnson quickly called upon Bernie Samonds, president of the Derita-Statesville Road Community Organization, to mobilize his members against encroaching smut. Members of the Oak Grove Methodist Church, the nearest place of worship, also emerged as vocal opponents, although their church lies beyond the 1500-foot limit. "It detracts from the area," Pastor Bob Symanski told a reporter from WSOC-TV news, adding that his congregation's opposition to adult businesses was "a matter of faith."

Opponents claim Central Avenue Video and businesses like it are magnets for criminal activity, citing police reports showing that last year, more than 150 incidents—including a rape -- took place within a quarter-mile of McMillan's establishment at 2123 Central Avenue. Most of the reported offenses, however, were crimes against property -- vandalism, petty theft. Even local police point out that the area teems with itinerant vagrants, homeless people encamped in nearby Veterans Park, and residents of a troubled housing development facing demolition. Visions of ravening pantless "sex predators" notwithstanding, crime in Central Avenue Video's immediate neighborhood can be traced to many sources that have nothing whatever to do with porn.

A more convincing motivator for Charlotte's anti-porn brigade is the notion, founded in part on the fantasized link to crime, that adult businesses drive property values into the gutter. Charlotte's Plaza-Midwood district is rapidly gentrifying, with working-class and elderly residents being driven out by rising rents and the destruction of low-income Morningside Apartments. The latter is soon to be replaced by condos with a price-range of $150,000 to $1 million. In the words of an anonymous posting to the official blog of Morningside Apartments, the 58-year-old, 35-acre development is being razed "presumably to bring wealthier people into the neighborhood and cleanse the neighborhood of Thoreauvians." (Not to mention the Bosnian and Sudanese immigrants who have settled there in recent years.)

The Statesville Road address may have seemed a less vulnerable and more affordable site for McMillan's operation. But real-estate greed is also gathering force in the adjacent Nevins Park neighborhood, whose inhabitants have recently been adding improvements in the hope of attracting new residents and pushing property values upward. Nevins Park residents regard the proposed adult bookstore as a looming blight on a part of town they seek to represent as on its way up.

Cleaning up all the way to the bank

Court rulings have established that while sex shops, peepshows, adult cinemas, strip clubs, and adult book and video stores may have some First Amendment protection, local governments may regulate where and how they operate. In City of Renton v. Playtime Theatre (1986), the US Supreme Court paved the way for considerable regulatory mischief by accepting "secondary effects" arguments as a basis for ruling that local governments could determine the business hours, floor plans, inventories, and locations of businesses dealing in sexually explicit expression.

The alleged secondary effects of porn -- crime, public health hazards, declining property values -- were fancifully certified in the late 1970s and early '80s by studies cooked up in LA, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. More recent rulings have backed away from Renton's acceptance of shoddy data. The U.S. Supreme Court tightened the criteria for zoning regulations in City of Los Angeles v. Alameda Books (2002); the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals noted in Peek-a-Boo Lounge v. Manatee County that property values had actually risen in the vicinity of Peek-a-Boo Lounge since the Florida strip club opened, and that its presence was promoting neither crime nor blight.

In practice, however, the reality of secondary effects may be beside the point when determined corporate interests move in. Republican Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, the ex-mayor now trying to ingratiate himself with religious conservatives as "the man who cleaned up New York," initiated a draconian porn-zoning ordinance for New York City in 1995. Wrapped in piety, the ordinance was in effect crafted to benefit developers lusting after prime locations in midtown Manhattan. The Disney-tainted corporate remake of formerly porn-friendly, traditionally egalitarian Times Square vividly indicates where such zoning regulations lead. Recent pressures applied to adult businesses in Charlotte and elsewhere have been steeped in that cleanup-for-profit tradition, helping "respectable" business entrepreneurs undo other business entrepreneurs perceived as not-so-respectable.

On August 28, members and friends of the Derita-Statesville Road Community Organization, eager to voice disapproval of porn, completely packed the monthly meeting of the Charlotte Zoning Board of Adjustment. A scheduled hearing on the disposition of 6829 Statesville Road was nipped in the bud, however, when Central Avenue Video was granted a continuance. The North Carolina Bar Association requires that a member of the state bar represent the petitioner in such hearings; owner McMillan's lawyer, Cary Wiggins, is from Georgia. Central Avenue Video's relocation proposal is now expected to head the agenda at the Zoning Board's September 25 meeting, by which time McMillan is expected to have hired a local attorney.