Determined to enforce its covenants, the Lansdowne Potomac Club Homeowners Association has cracked down on some 40 homeowners who operate small businesses out of their homes. The Loudoun Times-Mirror highlights the plight of a day care run by Oksana Downs, who caters to Russian-speaking children.
The Association is probably within its legal rights to order homeowners to close their businesses. But association board members should at least be honest with themselves: They’re part of the broader problem, not the solution. Small home-based businesses should be encouraged, not discouraged, as long as they do not prove disruptive to the neighbors.
The business owners have three alternatives: shut down, move to a neighborhood with a friendlier home owner’s association, or move the business to a location zoned for commercial activity. None are desirable. The notion that business and residential activities must be rigidly separated is an underlying cause of dysfunction in contemporary human settlement patterns. People working at home… people dropping off kids at the neighborhood day care… people seeking services from tax preparation to lawnmower repair from someone working out of their home… translates into people not overloading collector and arterial roads as they rush between scattered destinations to procure those services.
Furthermore, a community where residents interact as vendor and customer enjoys a richer network of personal interaction — something that is sorely lacking in the neighborhoods of strangers that dominate American suburbia. Permitting limited business interactions helps build trust and community. Homeowners associations should foster those attributes, not squelch them.
The Lansdowne Potomac Club Homeowners Association should consider revising its covenant. Far from hurting property values, the convenience of accessing unobtrusive services locally, and the feeling of community that the business interactions engender, will make the neighborhood, and the homes within it, more desirable and more valuable.
