The folks at TechRepublic.com recently profiled ZoningCheck, a new app launched on July 17 that is designed to make it easier for entrepreneurs to find properties on which to locate their businesses. Users choose a city, business type, and potential location and the app displays where the business use is permitted or prohibited.
Currently, the app is limited to a small group of California municipalities, but it’s being offered for free to the first 50 cities that sign on through the end of 2015.
The app is meant to streamline the process entrepreneurs must follow to open a business and simultaneously “open up” zoning codes to make them “clear and unambiguous.” As such, it has both “civic and commercial value.”
As one of the app’s creators noted, “I’m excited about how making a zoning computable could lead to rethinking how we do zoning, calculate it, and measure it. That’s in the future. Now, we’re just trying to make this easier for people to use.”
