Wow. Hacker News ate my text. Let's try this again.

Steve Blank wrote an article http://steveblank.com/2010/11/24/when-its-darkest-men-see-th... on why the traditional barriers of entry for businesses, particularly Internet-based businesses, are -simultaneously- falling down ... at the same time that a large number of recent-collage grads are entering the workforce in the middle of recession, with the real estate market still crashing around us. It means that not only is it easier to start your own business, many people are forced to.

Indeed, http://www.fastcompany.com/1707431/the-rise-of-the-homeprene... talks about the "homepreneurs", having home-based business.

One interesting thing reading this and reading the interviews in Founders At Work was that many of the tech founds then and the founds now say that it is much more acceptable now to operate a business from the home than it was say, in 1980. The idea of a garage-based business in Palo Alto is the stuff of legends, but the reality was that in mind 1970s, 1980s, even the early 1990s, you don't get as much credibility with a home-based business. With the number of big IPOs and "rags-to-riches" stories, garage-based businesses are more acceptable. So is the fact that people can rent Class-A digs to woo customers and investors.

But think about this in the context of that Atlantic article. The article talks about how the traditional mixed-use neighborhoods wove residential with commercial concerns. Someone living in a traditional neighborhood could get all of their basic living needs by walking, all within a 5 minute walk.

In other words, it -seems- that a "home-based" business is more acceptable in the present than in the past, but dig deeper into a past when towns were planned around neighborhoods instead of zones, and you see this is actually an American tradition.

What's different now is that the barriers of entry are falling particularly for web-based businesses. People outside of IT -- and even inside IT -- don't know this, but virtualization has changed the game since 2005. In late 1990s, the cost for setting up your server and a landline was in the tens of thousands. In 2005, it has dropped into the thousands, and probably less. With virtualization now, we're talking about ~$10/mth for base cost; expert labor costs much more than the servers themselves.

Even product-based businesses operate virtually now, as described in Tim Ferris's Four Hour Workweek. Product fulfillment can be outsourced to competent firms. So are product design and marketing. Just-in-time inventory has made its way to small businesses, so there isn't a need to warehouse inventory yourself.

My point is that the numbers of people with a non-traditional job -- that is, unless you look all the past 1920s when it was traditional to own your own business -- can fly under the radar of zoning laws. And further, there will be an increasing demand and pressure for traditionally-planned, neighborhood-based communities. I don't think homepreneurs want to live in surburbia. I have friends who drive out to the local coffee shop, to get their socialization while "working from home". And if that coffee shop was instead a pleasant, 5-minute walk away?