Since this is the season for self-congratulatory industry awards, we can’t overlook one of our industry’s highest honors, the Zoning and Planning Law Report Land Use Decision Awards (aka the “ZiPLeRs”). For those of you who do not subscribe to the Zoning and Planning Law Report, the “strangest, or at least more dramatic” land use cases each year are eligible for nomination for a ZiPLeR.
Our colleage Dwight Merriam recently announced the 2010 Awards in the January 2011 issue of ZPLR, and what do you know, a case we nominated “won” the “Home Business Of The Year” Award. We use the term “won” quite loosely, since if you read the facts of the 11th Circuit case, Flava Works, Inc. v. City of Miami, No. 09-11264 (June 25, 2010), involving a South Florida “voyeur/porn dorm” and whether it qualifies as a “business,” this isn’t exactly something we’re going to trumpet on our C.V. (although now it is preserved for eternity on the internet).
Here’s Dwight’s summary:
The “Home-Business-Of-The-Year” Award goes to Coco Dorm in Miami, Florida, which unfortunately had to close up shop at the residence at 503 Northeast 27th Street when the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals determined that they were a business operating in a residential zone. Robert H. Thomas of Damon Key Leong Kupchak Hastert in Honolulu, and the author of the informative blog inversecondemnation.com, made this nomination. He gets special credit for blatantly pandering to the ZiPLeR Awards Committee on his website. Here’s a direct quote from his June 28, 2010 posting … [see here, where we nominated the case for the “TMI” or “Too Much Flava” Award] … Nice try at attempting to usurp the ZiPLeR Awards Committee naming rights. Also, ZiPLeR’s are never TMI; ZiPLeRs are founded on TMI, and you are all about to get TMI.
Last year, we gave this very same business an award. The “We- Are-Just-Working-Girls” Award went to www.cocodorm.com operating a website offering pornographic video over the Internet for a fee.
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The Eleventh Circuit should probably get — heck, why not, they do get — a special “Dirty Dancing” Award for hot-footing around their own Voyeur Dorm decision and finding that the buisness was illegal. It is worth reading.
For the complete write up on the case and on the others which received ZiPLeRs, pick up a copy of the January 2011 Zoning and Planning Law Report.