Home-Based Businesses

Jack Shafer may think the good thing about the new local DC news site TBD.com is that it has weather and traffic updates, but I’m mostly just glad to see some granual reporting on communities. You can learn a lot. For example, Sommer Mathis’ profile of the people behind one noteworthy house with flamingoes in the window pulls back the curtain on some of the endless cycle of zoning issues that undergird urban life:

The stretch of 11th Street NW that runs through Shaw is already unique compared to the rest of the neighborhood. Zoning rules allow a number of the street’s modest rowhouses to double as home-based businesses, giving way to a patchwork of beauty salons, locksmiths, and legal practices mixed right in alongside purely residential addresses.

Hence, David Toran’s chandelier business:

He got his start in the chandelier business in Philadelphia, when he was still in high school. Back then, Toran worked part-time for his father, a factory rep for a lighting fixture manufacturer and importer, and soon learned the rare skill of being able to assemble and install chandeliers.

A series of careers later, Toran came to D.C. in the late 1980s as a locomotive engineer for Amtrak, and then later worked at Maurice Electric in Rockville. It was there that he got back in touch with his childhood trade of working with chandeliers — Toran’s father had actually worked with the electrical distributor decades earlier as part of his sales territory, so the company had access to a client list that Toran would eventually be able to mine in order to get Chandelier Services off the ground.

Obviously, there are only so many many chandelier-servicing businesses a city is going to support. But in general, it strikes me as a good thing if a city makes it relatively easy for people with skills to start new businesses. I’ve walked down that stretch of 11th Street many times—indeed, used to live between 10th and 11th—and it never struck me as a nuisance that a handful of professionals and craftsmen were working there. I think it would be better to expand the range of locations in which it’s possible to do this. A person who owns a rowhouse and knows how to work with chandeliers and wants to start a home-based chandelier-repair business shouldn’t need to find a way to sell his house and buy a new one on 11th Street (which has gotten a lot more expensive over the past ten years anyway) in order to do so.