Research has shown that immigrants play an essential, but often unacknowledged, role in servicing a wide range of needs in urban globalized financial centers, both in formal and informal economic spheres ( Sassen 1990, 2001). However, for many immigrant women working in this industry, sexually oriented massage parlor businesses, though illicit, provide income for them and thereby their families. We are not referring here to trafficked women workers or coercive sex work. This is a complex and controversial issue, and remains highly debated in research about global sex work ( Sanders, O’Neill, and Pitcher 2009). Planners should also consider possible benefits of sexually oriented massage parlors in terms of immigrant livelihoods and urban economies in general. Consequently, uninformed attempts at regulation may shunt unwanted uses to neighborhoods with higher levels of social disorganization and less political clout, leading to an inequitable concentration of unwanted uses in vulnerable lower income, minority and immigrant communities.
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Research on the social ecology of sex-related businesses indicates that higher income and more socially organized communities have the political clout to prevent the siting of sex-related businesses and control the ways such businesses operate, ostensibly to mitigate negative secondary effects ( Edwards 2010 Weitzer 2014). In a context already primed for dispersal, planning practices can have the unintended consequence of simply displacing sexually oriented massage parlors to neighboring communities. Technological innovations, such as the internet, have created conditions that promote dispersal of sexually oriented massage parlors and other sexually oriented businesses beyond traditional red light districts ( Murphy and Venkatesh 2006).
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If local planners and other government agencies design regulations to direct the location of sexually oriented massage parlors, they should also consider how to avoid reproducing inequitable distribution of controversial land uses.
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The first two issues noted above center on the inequitable distribution of controversial land uses and the regional impacts of local level planning efforts to push out such uses.
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Filling the gap in our understanding of massage parlor clustering is vitally important as planners work not only to regulate and control unwanted and controversial land uses but also to create enabling environments for formalized economic development and growth, especially for immigrant populations. As such, studying how economic forces of customer demand and labor supply, and local regulation, relate to the spatial clustering of sexually oriented massage parlors provides a way for planners, scholars, and advocates to better understand some key planning issues. 2013 Lever, Kanouse, and Berry 2005 Polaris Project 2011 Robbins 2014 Vives and Goffard 2017), embody the intersection of several important planning issues: potential negative secondary effects of controversial land uses, the possible inequitable distribution of controversial land uses, lack of awareness of the potentially productive economic function of illegal business activities, and enabling factors for legal immigrant business development. Sexually oriented massage parlors, which primarily employ Asian immigrant women workers ( Bungay et al.