# Zoning

The local rules setting what a property may lawfully be used for.

A business can run for twenty years in a place it would not be permitted to open today, protected as a legal non-conforming use, and that protection can end when the use lapses or the property changes hands. That makes it a question for diligence rather than an assumption: confirm the current use is permitted, and ask what happens if the building is damaged. It also caps what you can add, so a plan to put a service bay behind the shop is a zoning question before it is a capital one.

In numbers: A shop operating as a legal non-conforming use can lose that status after a vacancy of as little as 6 months in some codes, and rebuilding to current code on a $4M acquisition can add $265,000 of work nobody priced.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/zoning
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt