Local land use regulations do more than severely restrict the size, shape, design and placement of homes, creating scarcity and driving up prices. They also heavily regulate the activities that occur inside those homes.
These regulations derive from legitimate local police powers. Local governments exist primarily for the purpose of keeping the peace, and Americans have always granted their cities and towns some power to regulate noise, pollution and other public disturbances.
Where those lines are drawn, however, is a source of increasingly intense debate as technological developments change America’s culture and economy.
Automobiles and factories brought strict regulations to divide communities into regions segregated by use. Today, 21st century technologies have transformed the way Americans live and work, but 20th century land use regulations have not caught up. Legislators have proposed some updates to accommodate these changes.
Home-based businesses
House Bill 1351 would modernize New Hampshire’s home-based business regulations by creating a uniform standard allowing Granite Staters to start low-and no-impact business in their homes.
No-impact businesses would be those that aren’t visible from the street, have no customer visits, and don’t exceed regular residential deliveries. Low-impact businesses would have to maintain a residential exterior appearance, limit customer visits to between 7 a.m.-9 p.m., create no queuing on any public way, and have no more than four on-site employees. (Sexually oriented businesses, junkyards and businesses prohibited by state statute would not be allowed.)
American entrepreneurs have always started business in spare bedrooms, basements, home offices, sheds and garages to avoid having to borrow money to pay costly commercial rents. When local governments prevent or severely restrict home-based business activity itself, rather than negative spillover effects, they suppress entrepreneurship, job creation and economic growth. HB 1351 would free Granite Staters to launch modern small businesses, provided that the business activity doesn’t disturb the peace.
That’s where Americans drew the line before local governments got carried away with their zoning powers in recent decades.
“A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle,” Boston attorney and patriot James Otis argued in his famous 1761 case against Britain’s writs of assistance.
The phrase “whilst he is quiet” was important. The idea that peaceable citizens should enjoy broad control of their property so long as they don’t disturb their neighbors is not new.
Two other bills apply similar logic to the regulation of education and day care.
Education
House Bill 1050 would allow education by right statewide. Historically, Americans always have educated children at home, in churches, and in small gatherings wherever space could be found. The rise of modern public schools brought regulations restricting where education could occur. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, those regulations have sometimes prohibited people from gathering privately to teach their children at home and even in commercial areas.
Because there’s no public health or safety justification for banning education as an allowed use in residential or commercial areas, HB 1050 would make education an allowed activity while still allowing municipalities to regulate impacts on the neighborhood.
Child care
In 2024, legislators passed House Bill 1567 to legalize home-based child care in all residential zones. Researchers for St. Anselm College’s NH Zoning Atlas found that 55% of New Hampshire communities required a special exception or site plan review to open a home-based child care. And 81% of communities had to change their zoning in some way to comply with HB 1567.
That law allowed small, home-based providers to fill some of the state’s massive demand for child care services. But it didn’t address restrictions on child care in commercial zones. It turns out that municipalities commonly forbid both education and child care in some commercial zones.
These bans serve no public health or safety purpose. Municipalities use them for design purposes. But clustering child care businesses into areas preferred by municipal planners contributes to the state’s child care shortage, forces people to drive longer distances to access child care and puts it out of reach for many. It also prevents entrepreneurs from locating small child care centers where people need them most: in or near the buildings where they work.
HB 1195 would free Granite Staters to start child care businesses where they’re most needed, rather than where planners imagine they should go. It also would fix an oversight in the 2024 law to allow home-based day care to be provided in existing ADUs.
