In a nation where as many as one of every four domiciles houses a home business, it's perplexing to find prohibitions on baking and selling cookies in your own kitchen, tutoring college students in your dining room or hiring a teenager to read to children in your day-care center. Not until he and his four employees, who conducted most of their business via phone and computer, were installed in the stately house did Gutierrez learn that the neighborhood was zoned residential. Only members of the residing family as employees. All business activities conducted indoors. No external evidence of business activity, such as commercial vehicles, inordinate traffic, noise, dust, or odors.
Similar rules exist throughout the country.
Cambridge, Mass., home businesses can't have signs. Fortunately, as home-based businesses become more numerous and their owners more sophisticated about the law, municipal governments are following Naperville's lead. It's likely that a majority of home businesses operate undetected or at least unmolested. In 1998, Schaumburg, Ill.'s planning director, Frank Robbins, complained that out of an estimated 4,000 full-time home operations in his town, a paltry 381 were actually licensed. Abiding by the law, however, could not only keep you out of trouble but advance the cause and bring your compatriots out of the closet.