Adult Movie Theatres in Houston

What is open right now

Two more closed and the listings have not caught up everywhere: the Executive Adult Video Superstore and Theatre on Northwest Freeway, and LV Video on Gessner Road.

The city with no zoning, except for this

Houston is the largest city in the United States without a zoning code. There is no map dividing it into residential and commercial and industrial, and no rule in general terms about what may be built where. It is the defining fact about the place and it is not an oversight. The city has been asked three times and has said no three times.

The margin narrowed every time, from a rout in 1948 to four points in 1993, and the answer stayed the same. Four years after that last vote, the council adopted the sexually oriented business ordinance.

It does what a zoning code does. An adult business may not sit within 1,500 feet of a school, a church, a public park or a day care centre, nor within 1,500 feet of another one. The earlier rule had been 750 feet, and doubling it in a city of protected uses on almost every arterial road removed most of the map at once. Businesses already trading were given 180 days to find somewhere legal.

Planning lawyers make the distinction carefully: these rules have the effect of zoning without being part of any land use plan, because there is no plan for them to be part of. Houston zoned one industry and nothing else.

Sixteen years, and then a price

The operators went to court and stayed there. The Fifth Circuit upheld the ordinance on 25 November 2003 in N.W. Enterprises v. City of Houston, finding it a time, place and manner rule aimed at secondary effects rather than at what was on the screen, and waving away the 180-day deadline on the grounds that the litigation itself had given everyone years. Around 150 businesses were exposed to it. The city put its own gain from enforcement at roughly $600,000 a year.

The fight did not end with a ruling. It ended with a deal. In 2013, sixteen years after the ordinance passed, the city settled with a group of clubs: they were released from the rule keeping dancers three feet from customers, and in exchange they tore out their private rooms, agreed to report prostitution, drugs and indecent exposure, hand over the names and ages of their staff, and pay about $1 million a year into the city’s human trafficking abatement fund. The money paid for a twelve-officer police unit.

Set that beside Tampa, which passed a six-foot rule in 1999 and then simply stopped enforcing it. Houston kept its three-foot rule enforceable and sold the exemption. The two cities reached the same place by opposite routes, and only one of them is being paid.

Why they are all on the freeway

Two 1,500-foot circles, one round every school and church and park, one round every existing adult business, will clear a city like Houston almost completely. What they leave is the strip of land beside the freeways: frontage roads with no houses on them, no schools, no congregations, and enough distance between exits to keep one venue out of the next one’s circle.

Gulf Freeway, Eastex Freeway, Northwest Freeway. Four of the five places still trading in Houston are on one, and the two that closed were on one as well. Los Angeles used 1,000 feet to disperse its adult businesses across the city. Houston used 1,500 and concentrated them along four roads, which is the opposite outcome from the same instrument.