In the US, zoning ordinances often treat modest home enterprises as threats to the neighborhood. If you're just running an online business, local governments generally won't bother you, but if clients are coming to your home, then they try to limit the visibility and impact of your business. Have these regulations gone too far? Should state governments tell local governments to leave home-based businesses alone, within certain limits?

Major companies have gotten their start in someone's garage. At this point, it's almost a mandatory back-story for any Silicon Valley company. Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, and Amazon all boast garage-based origins.

And it's not just fledgling tech startups. In residential neighborhoods across America, home-based businesses are the hidden sinews of resilient local economies, from the mom who takes care of several neighborhood kids while their parents work, to the independent tax accountant hanging out his shingle. From the Russian immigrant baking and selling honey cakes to those in the know, to a group of families that started a micro-school during the pandemic.

The rise of remote work makes home-based businesses more viable, because the potential customer base for small neighborhood retail is growing. More Americans could now benefit from the convenience of doing business close to home. Already, about 50 percent of all small businesses and 69 percent of startups are home-based.

New Hampshire is the only state with a complete dataset of local zoning regulations on home-based businesses, based on a survey of laws conducted by the Initiative for Housing Policy and Practice at Saint Anselm College. About 20 percent of the state's independent zoning authorities outright ban home-based businesses and occupations in at least one residential district. Twenty towns ban the Hewlett-Packard origin story — a business in a detached garage — outright. Twenty-six more require a special permit. Other finicky regulations include requirements to build more parking (56 towns) or prohibitions on building more parking (14 towns), subjecting home businesses to site plan review, which comes with a public hearing and potentially costly requirements to run tests and studies (89 towns), and strict limits on the square footage a resident may use for running a business (22 towns set limits at or below 600 square feet). 

You can bet that if "Live Free or Die" New Hampshire has these regulations, other states' rules are at least as onerous. In 2021, Florida legalized home-based businesses in all residential districts but otherwise allows local governments to regulate their operation. New Hampshire, California, Washington, Oregon, and Colorado have legalized home-based childcare statewide.