Building a better brothel

Recent thoughts about the legalization of prostitution got me thinking about how prostitution could be legalized without having a negative effect on the quality of life of residents who are neither an employee nor a client of the sex industry. I have no problem with legalized prostitution itself, but I think having it all over the streetscape would devalue the whole city. I'm quite proud of the little urban niche I've found for myself, and I would be ashamed if it if it were suddenly flooded with gaudy neon like a Montreal strip club, or if they started having prostitutes standing in display windows like those patties they sell at 7-Eleven à la Amsterdam, or if cars started pulling up alongside me while I'm walking home minding my own business. Prostitution is so much classier if done discreetly.

So I got thinking: how do you fit something into the urban landscape without people noticing unless they're looking for it?

Well, what element of the urban landscape don't you notice unless you're looking for it?

Office buildings! All they have to do is model brothels on office buildings!

The first step is to make sure brothels are called brothels. Maybe not the word "brothel" because it's rather old-fashioned and may be disrespectful, but some word that isn't used for anything else. No spas, massage parlours, holistic centres, nightclubs, etc. Escort services maybe. Just make sure it doesn't have the same name as something that also exists as a non-sex-related service, so people don't accidently wander into a brothel while looking for a watchmaker or something.

Then the building itself has to be set up like an office building, as opposed to a storefront. You walk in, there's a lobby with a reception desk or signage directing you to the various services available, you go to the specific suite you're looking for, and then once you're inside it can cease to look like an office. They could make zoning rules so that certain buildings are sex-work only, much like there are office buildings that contain only medical offices. The outside of the building would have a discreet sign (no neon XXX or anything) stating in the standardized euphemism what kind of building it is. The building could have some kind of designated indoor smoking area or be set back from the street so that people leaving don't congregate on the sidewalk (if people who have just been to a prostitute are anything like people who have just been to a strip club, I wouldn't want to have to walk by clumps of them outside the building). If they feel a discreet sign isn't enough, they can advertise by mentioning their street number (or maybe even put it in their name like Club 279), and put a really big street number on their building.

This way the locations of newly-legalized sex work can be as unobtrusive as possible, so people who need nothing to do with it can just walk by without noticing it any more than you notice an office building that you never need to go to. This will help keep NIMBYism from hindering the legalization of prostitution, give sex workers (and their clients) more dignified working conditions, and make our streetscape much classier overall.