Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
Immediately post-college, I shared houses with other 20-somethings. It was always a single lease - 4 roommates listed, 4 beds, all of us responsible for the full amount of the rent. But, we were absolutely allowed to reside in the same home. Same thing in college - single lease for four people in a four bedroom apartment.
Edit - post college was Northern VA (DC Metro). College was UVA, Charlottesville, VA.
Edit 2 - partially answering my own question... For Fairfax Co, VA... Can a home or dwelling unit have multiple renters? Generally, no more than one family, plus two renters, may live together as a single household. Or, no more than four unrelated people may live in one house as a single household. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/code/multiple-occupancymultipl...
All my past rentals were 4 people, so within the limit. And given the size of most homes (4 bedroom is typical), doesn't seem totally unreasonable (ADUs and "granny flats" count as separate homes, so not covered by the 4 person rule).
Even what you described (single lease, 4 roommates) is very common and usually allowed but the single lease part is what self-limits the impact of boarding-house type places. You need to find 3 other people to go in on this place with. You need to trust those other people and coordinate lease payments and utility payments and deal with it when some of them to decide to move on. That's a headache!
Either way I don’t think most millennials want more than 2 per room anyway.
It's right there in the article:
"And as SROs disappeared, homelessness—which had been rare from at least the end of the Great Depression to the late 1970s—exploded nationwide."
I don't understand why local governments feel like they need to regulate every aspect of a household. Enact laws against the negative externalities that are associated with SRO occupancy if the existing residents want them, and then leave things alone.
1/ If one roommate is disruptive (noise complaints, property damage, safety issues), landlords and other tenants have limited legal tools short of eviction of everyone. That blunt instrument makes it unattractive for landlords to allow multi-tenant arrangements.
2/ From a legal discriminatory standpoint, the law doesn't have much protections for people blocking certain raises or genders from renting.
3/ Many local codes were written with “traditional families” in mind. Some municipalities cap unrelated adults per household (e.g., “no more than 3 unrelated people”), which makes normal roommate setups technically non-compliant even if the lease is joint.
4/ Standard renters or homeowners policies often don’t contemplate multiple unrelated parties. Landlords worry about claims, while tenants may find themselves uncovered in disputes or accidents.
I tried to get umbrella insurance for myself, but because I rent out other rooms and I didn't want to also cover my 2-3 roommates, I am forced to go uncovered or find another provider.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but why is this a problem? When you're living in such close quarters with people, you should have some freedom in choosing who you're living with. The classic example would be a "female only" household that doesn't allow men for real or perceived safety reasons. There are also cultures/religions where cohabitation with those of the opposite sex is taboo.
The race angle is more thorny, but I'd rather lean in the direction of allowing people to choose who they co-habitate with.
I should have a very high degree of freedom over who is allowed to share that space with me and I shouldn't have to justify not allowing another person (stranger or not) to co-habitate.
But, yes, if you have a typical shared home, where 4 people get together and rent a home at once, yes, you do have that control (and should have it).
No matter what. You rent? Yeah, sorry. The landlord makes the rules.
The hypothetical foursome would need to purchase their property. At that point, they would be able to control for who could live there.
If it's an SRO lease where they are leasing just a single room and access to common areas then yes the landlord can lease rooms as he can find tenants for them.
The tenants have zero control.
The only people allowed to reside at the property, are people the landlord has allowed to do so. Those approved residents are not allowed to then decide to allow different people to reside at the property. Even new tenants sought out in an attempt to sublease, will have to be endorsed by the landlord. Not the current tenants.
People on this thread appear to believe tenants get these rights. No. Tenants get a different set of rights. They can decide who they want to live with. But they cannot decide who they want to live with in a given landlord's house. The landlord gets the right to decide who can reside at the property. Full stop. That the tenants believe X is a great guy is irrelevant to the deliberations of the vast majority of landlords. If you insist on living with X, then you'll have to find another property to rent if X is not agreeable to the landlord.
And the law backs up the landlord's dispassionate disposition on approving residents.
Basically you can choose your roommates, and you are then constrained in the places you're allowed to reside. That constraint being only those places willing to accept all of your roommates.
My point was only that in an SRO/boarding house situation, the tenant has no control, and at any given point in time, the tenant in the next room could change.
And in a shared home "joint and several" lease situation, the tenants control who can live in the home at the beginning of the lease (but, yes, they're effectively locked into that arrangement for the duration of the lease).
Yes, in both cases, the landlord generally has more power than the tenants. That wasn't my point.
And if the landlord is being selective on the basis of race or other protected class, that's flat-out illegal.
Depends on what your lease says. The owner can give that option.
The landlord cannot legally give you the right to weigh in on a separate lease (SRO) if you'll make decisions using a protected class (i.e. you only want a particular sex in the SRO).
Because it makes it relatively more difficult for minorities to obtain housing, see sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348212
> The classic example would be a "female only" household that doesn't allow men for real or perceived safety reasons. There are also cultures/religions where cohabitation with those of the opposite sex is taboo.
The solution to the “female only” or the religiously observant household is for the renters/buyers to self-select and organize themselves. I don’t see why the landlord/seller needs to mandate it.
I think it's because the only two options being presented are a group of people signing one lease with one landlord. Or a group of people individually signing leases with the landlord.
So basically, the problem is for people that can't find a group on their own. Or for a landlord who wants to act like every room is an apartment, when they're clearly not.
Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.
Huh? Who said anything about social media? Churches and other religious organizations are basically designed to promote and foster these kinds of in-group relationships.
> Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.
It would be very strange to tell someone they can’t decide their own roommate because their selection would be “racist/sexist.” I’m trying to imagine how you would even go about enforcing that at the individual level. Is your plan to assign housing randomly with some centralized lottery system? Extract affadavits from prospective tenants?
Do you believe it’s sexist for a heterosexual woman to use a dating website to look for a husband and not a wife? I don’t see why your logic wouldn’t apply there.
If non-profits and governments can operate SROs, hacker houses can operate co-ed inclusive housing, I don't see why people feel they .
Are we talking about dating or housing? Society agrees everyone deserves a place to live. Society (mostly) agrees that no one deserves romance.
It is important to ensure that when you allow such discrimination it is by unit and that landlords not be allowed to discriminate overall
The other (smaller) issue I think is house hackers (landlord occupied properties). The landlord doesn't own multiple units and is effectively "airbnb-ing" out rooms for short term leases.
Landlords/sellers aren't typically the limiting on gender (because they legally cant), but the renters/buyer's "self-select" process is sexist/racist. People post advertisements on FB looking for a new roommate of certain type.
If anything, landlords in my area subrenting / house hacking are better at managing a home with mixed race / gender than people "self-selecting" with racist/sexist ads.
The purpose of the system is what it does. They don't want to make doing "bad" things easy so they let your only option be through the same absurd catch-all process.
"The Color of Law" is a good starter read here.
That really doesn't track with the laws actually written. Every single city I've lived in with restrictions on number of unrelated tenants, simultaneously has an exception that there are no limits on related parties, whether through blood or marriage.
They are very much limiting the number of unrelated people in a single dwelling and it's targeting slumlords, not the renters.
(property owner, many units, yimby, have to interface with the citizenry at zoning meetings, etc)
(as someone who has acquired lots, rezoned, and have contracted to have multifamily built in such areas)
If I owned a house would I object to the neighbor taking in a boarder or two? No, but I could see being unhappy about them moving out and turning the house into an SRO rental, especially if those tenants created a nuisance in the neighborhood. Same as a problematic Air BnB.
I think a good compromise might be allowing SRO/boarding if the owner also lives in the house. That is what my town is discussing for at least some residential neighborhoods.
SROs should also be more often allowed in already multifamily/high density residental areas.
If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
This is an opinion, not a right codified in statute, and state laws can be enacted to override local planning ability to prevent upzoning. People who live in their community are entitled to affordable housing (again, my opinion, maybe not yours). Property owners leave, property owners die; the path to success is to simply continue to grind against the nimby machine.
That said, if I can afford to buy property and want to build higher-density lower-cost rental housing on it, that should generally be my right as well.
No one is entitled to affordable housing in any specific location.
I’d be interested as to any country that recognizes this as an explicit right.
I guess that overrides centuries of precedent.
The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.
>If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
From what I've seen the actual policies being pushed by "yimbys" seem much closer to yiyby.
We already have a number of rules of what you can and can't do with your private property that I think most people agree on. You can't build a slaughterhouse right in the middle of a residential area. You can't dump your garbage into the water flowing through your property. Etc.
Those are rules we all agree on because they have immediate and very visible primary effects.
The things we're talking about now are less visible secondary effects, but they're still very real.
The ability of our entire society to be able to securely and affordably house all its members is a much stronger imperative than the ability of people in any particular area to have nice views, or neighbors who all share the same socioeconomic class/skin color/native language as them.
Yimbys go even smaller. They don't care about things that are not in their backyard.
You want an apartment building on your land? Cool, none on my land thanks.
If you care about freedom, go with yimbys. The nimbys are the ones putting encumbrances on your property.
You could just be honest and say "I want to use government power to suit my needs, even if it costs other people. But no one else can do that". It's pretty selfish but at least we'll know where you stand.
You can't know that though. Unless you hold a referendum to renew the rules every year and they pass by a 100% majority.
The only honest way to do it is without invoking government power. Move to a gated community. Have a neighborhood association, funded solely by residents, whose bylaws require that it gets to have any property up for sale in the community as long as it matches any other accepted offer on it.
If you want your "dream community" spend your own money. Don't go into other people's pockets.
The key being that anyone can use them. Everyone benefits. With restrictive zoning only property owners who want their neighborhood to remain unchanged benefit but everyone pays the cost.
The community can express its desires by building whatever kind of housing they want on their property. What you're talking about is my property having to reflect the desires of the rest of the community.
Potential new residents should have no say, and actual new residents knew what they were before they purchased the property.
If you want property to be a neighbourhood thing then you should also be required to let the benefits of your own property accrue to your whole neighbourhood and not just yourself. So no tall fences for example. How come everyone else should have to do what you want, but you shouldn't have to do what everyone else wants?
Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them. They naturally want to pull the ladder up.
But if you just let them, then there's 0 new homes being built in the US. And then the economy implodes.
We have to toe a line necessarily. If you just allow the tragedy of the commons to happen 100%, then everyone loses. Everyone, including those who benefit.
Its like feudalism. Feudalism seems like a fantastic idea if you're a feudal lord. But... Its actually not. No, you lose too.
Imagine how much richer those feudal lords could have been had they not impeded the progress of Europe for hundreds of years.
Upzoning actually increases land values, because it gives you the option to develop your land into a higher-productivity use (and hence higher potential rents).
NIMBYs in my observation tend to be anti-change; they bought with the neighbourhood a particular way and want it to stay that way. Upzoning brings in a change in the vibe and demographic that they don't want.
Of course.
> Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
Pro-housing people in my area absolutely are trying to force people to do things with their property and in their neighborhood by barring covenants and other restrictions that can be put in place by municipalities and HOAs.
If that was the case i.e. nobody wanted to build anything new on their land why would the “convenant” be necessary. Or is the idea that former owners can impose these decisions they made on anyone they sell the property to?
I have evaluated the risk and am sufficiently certain that won’t happen. The lots around my house are far too expensive to turn into landfill.
Almost every household with a child is tax revenue negative, and I don't think you're suggesting we reform education funding to correct that.
Their framing also highlights the important financial difference between children and sewers, though: the former get less expensive and more productive over time, and the latter do the opposite, which is how the problems happen.
Fiscal soundness at the local level should not be a political issue, but IMO the progressive left has turned it into one by attacking anyone and everyone who isn't in rigid alignment with every element of their housing agenda, which includes some pretty radical (and largely undesirable) changes for most Americans. And then of course when people balk at these undesirable changes, they're called racist, selfish, or both.
I don't agree that you can really claim one part of town is subsidizing others based on the analysis from firms like urban3. Sure, if you stuck 10 businesses on a plot of land where only 1 exists now and those businesses all thrive, tax revenue would be higher for that plot of land. Is there demand for 10 more businesses in your city or town, times every drive thru fast food joint or Starbucks? Is it actually a problem that businesses are paying more in taxes than they consume in services, which lets residents pay less than they consume? Would those businesses be there if their owners couldn't live in the type of housing they wanted in the city? There are so many intertwined issues that seem impossible to decouple to me, in addition to the obvious issue that the school system is the primary consumer of tax revenue in almost every area and the taxes paid by parents don't come close to covering that expense.
It's also not a coincidence that they picked an economically depressed area with a fairly high crime rate for this analysis. If they looked at a city with residents who made the median household income for the US, or even above it, I suspect you'd see a very different picture (though the larger point is still worth considering and largely valid).
I do agree completely that the federal and state governments are just setting these places up for failure (and future rounds of external funding), but I don't see YIMBYs talking about that. They just seem to be angry that people are living more comfortably than they would like in lower density housing instead of embracing the urban lifestyle they are so passionate about, and want to force everyone to align to their vision not for fiscal stability, but for ideological reasons.
Of course they're entitled to stop efforts to change the world around them. If you moved into a neighborhood with a minimum lot size was X acres, it's a reasonable expectation that it remains as such. If someone comes along and not only wants to change that, but also build multi unit apartment complexes across the street from you, why should you not have a say? Clearly the person was not allowed to do that before changing the zoning rules so why can't I try to stop them from changing them at all?
There's nothing racist about wanting to live a quiet suburban or rural life where you can neither see nor hear the next house over.
Correct, people making what is for most the largest financial investment and commitment of their lives want to have control over what happens to it. When you have a 30 year mortgage on a piece of property that is many times your gross yearly income, you're kind of invested in the most literal sense of the word.
It would be one thing if the re-zoning included an offer to buy or move every house within X distance that has property values and "standard of living" directly affected by the re-zoning. But in almost all cases when the re-zoning occurs, the response is: sucks to be you.
I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the developer will make more money if it's in an already developed area, at the expense of all the existing homeowners.
I think a large part of the problem is that states and to a lesser degree the feds are trying to compensate for problems created by places like SV (not that every state doesn't have comparable places doing similar) so they write rules that incentivize X or Y and so you wind up with weird "a bunch of duplex townhouses on .2ac" developments in the middle of nowhere and other places they don't make sense because developers are naturally pairing the incentivized types of construction with the cheapest suitable land.
Because the vision of quarter acre blocks from sea to sea is gut-wrenching and we would prefer to limit the bounds of human building so that some forests and wild lands remain.
Why will the developer make more money if it's in an already developed area?
Because that area has better access to shops, schools, and workplaces.
Sure, you could build a giant apartment building out on the edge of town—the land would certainly be cheaper!
But, given how things are today, it's unlikely you'd ever fill it in a way that would recoup your investment. In order to make something like that work, what we'd really need is proper public transport that reliably stopped at (or near) such a development, with well-sited stops in town in order to allow residents to do all the things they need to do. To reach the things that are in the town.
Meanwhile: it's perfectly understandable that people don't want to see change in their neighborhood, or that they buy a property in the expectation that everything good about it will remain. But that's not a reasonable constraint for the law to operate under. You do not in fact have a strict right to control things that happen outside the borders of your own lot.
Some community restrictions are reasonable. We broadly agree that it's not OK for someone to open a tannery in the middle of a suburban residential block. Others are not; for instance, neighbors several blocks over will argue that they have a right not to endure extra traffic when our local hospital, the largest employer and best hospital in the region, plans a small addition.
The most important phenomenon here is hyperlocalism. The immediate neighbors of new proposed residential developments will reliably oppose it. They'll also make up the overwhelming majority of those who show up for public comment, because normal people don't turn out to support new apartment buildings built across town. But if you accept that resistance as a given right, you're essentially saying nothing will ever get built.
The muni I'm in has managed to go from 70,000 residents to 50,000 by consistently applying this strategy, so it's not even accurate to say it's about "change", so much as it is about strangling out as many residents as possible to achieve a targeted demography.
Property owners are absolutely entitled to their property but that also includes things like noise, sanitation, and crime. It's called an HOA or a master planned community and approximately 30% of the US population lives in one.
Few people like HOAs but still engage in them despite all the downsides because they specifically don't want to live in high density housing where people are packing 10 or 15 unrelated people to a house, inviting crime, noise, sanitary issues, and all the other negatives of high density housing.
Single-family zoned areas by definition only have single-family homes, and only some families will be able to afford those homes. The designers of such policies are often well-aware that the only families affluent enough to purchase or rent a home in such an area is of the preferred race (thanks to the strong racial correlation to socioeconomic class, as well as historic explicit racist policies like redlining, employment and education segregation, etc etc).
To be clear, I don't believe that single-family zoning is necessarily racist, especially with the continued democratization of the middle class. Single-family zoning is bad for a lot of reasons. Its just that it is absolutely the case that historically single family zoning was deliberately used in several cases as a racist policy, but in such a way that it would pass muster in court.
See also: HOAs, school districting, road construction, railroad construction, gentrification...
That's just America.
Those people back then were trying use government force to make it harder for people to live in ways they didn't like in the via regulation all the same as people do here and now in 2025. They used race/nationality as a proxy for that insofar as it was an accurate proxy (which is why in the US it largely fell out of favor starting in the 1950s after the culturally flattening effect of the depression + ww2).
Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit, because to take a step back and assess the fundamentals of the sort of rulemaking being advocated for would be detrimental to their cause(s).
> Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit,
You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things, so I'm very confused. Do you somehow think that removing restrictions on unrelated tenancies is going to "micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways "?
Regardless of exactly which laws were passed to make living the "wrong" way hard for which demographics the fact of the matter is that race-baiting is purely a distraction and manipulative debate tactic here. The laws are bad on a fundamental level. To use "law is racist, therefore bad" is to engage in a logical slight of hand to avoid the question "if it's bad for municipalities to regulate in this manner why ought states be allowed to do it". Most local zoning codes, if not evaluated by a judicial system highly biased toward the government, would fail the Penn Central test in many places. Simply porting that level of micromanagement to the state level and then scaling it back from 11 to 7 doesn't make the fundamental premise of what's going on here (the government essentially taking land via regulation, to the detriment of owners and communities in the longer term) any less odious. Yeah, not cranking it to 11 does mostly solve it in the moment, but that's like replacing an bad king with a benevolent one. This just isn't an area the government ought to be regulating to the degree that it is. Yeah there's some extreme examples (toxic waste dumps and whatnot) but neither state nor local nor federal government has any business telling people where they can't put apartments or warehouses or other mild things like that.
These laws are bad because the government has no legitimate authority to micromanage the housing stock (and other things) on the fine grained level it does. The sum total of regulations effectively amount to a taking without compensation. They might also be racist in some cases, but that's on top of an already flawed premise.
>You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things
No, I'm saying this in reply to someone who's pretending to want to deregulate but simply wants to regulate in a different way. It's a more permissive way and an overall improvement but the premise is still flawed. Having state regulation that says municipalities can't zone away X, Y and Z simply moves the bickering over minutia from the town hall to the state legislature. It's like adding more and more rules to a geocentric solar system model. You'll get better and better but it's still not right at its core.
A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design, but he also traveled the country building these de facto redlining codes all across the continent.
It's not a red herring.
And who was the "no mobile homes" addendum written for?
You're using "racist = bad" as an excuse to avoid evaluating the premise of the law, which itself is bad too. It doesn't matter that the law is racist. There are tons and tons of areas in the zoning code that are just as bad because they inherent from the same premise of micromanagement, not being racially motivated doesn't make them good. The whole race thing is a red herring.
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
https://nextstl.com/2021/04/harland-bartholomew-destroyer-of...
https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0...
There were plenty of "NINA" ("No Irish Need Apply") signs throughout the North, the same way we had Jim Crow laws in the South. Other groups too: Poles and Jews were also not considered "white" during this time period, and then gradually assimilated as the nation's racial animus was focused elsewhere. JFK's election as the nation's first Irish-Catholic president was as significant in 1960 as Barack Obama's election as the first Black president in 2008.
Racism as it exists in America is socially constructed, but tribalism is universal. Interestingly different parts of the U.S. have different racial divides, eg. the black/white divide is not nearly so salient on the West Coast, but there is significantly more anti-Mexican racism and economic classism.
There are political cartoons drawn by fascists from the 1920s that attempt to stave off accusations of racism by pointing out that they include Italians (then show Mussolini as a racist caricature of a black man), as if Italians aren't widely considered white.
If you look at how the British and later Americans talked about the Irish "people" or "race", you'll note shocking similarities to how they talked about Africans, Native Americans, Asians of all stripes, etc etc. Explicit skin color rarely came up.
Racism, especially old timey racism, is all about "how do I define my group as 'good' and everybody else as so bad that I can treat them worse?"
Its also the case that even in the 1920s, while there was a lot of anti-Italian racism, people generally saw that Italian heritage was better than African heritage.
A black family or single person could not live in that location. We are talking about 4 unrelated people.
However, ascribing opposition to "fear of the unknown" as a motivator is likewise lazy. It works from the assumption that a) the nuclear family is arbitrary and thus have no presumption in their favor, and b) that there is no tolerance for substitutes for the nuclear family, in the strict sense. It's not like most people are clamoring to live in a polyamorist sex commune, so it's not a good explanation.
My point is, across multiple states, and various cities, I've never run across an instance without a family carve-out. I even went through the trouble of picking random large cities throughout the US and literally every one of them has a carve out. Unless you can provide some data otherwise, why is your comment relevant to this discussion? What value were you trying to add?
That's the stated reason. The real reason is of course to target the renters who cannot afford anything else.
Secondary suites are desirable for multi generational households. They are or were banned in many places.
The cities where you lived allowed any number of related people in a 1 bedroom apartment? A 2 person per bedroom limit seems common. Related or not. And prohibition of a child sharing the bedroom of an adult or a different sex child or a different gender child.
Many prohibitions are based on moral reasonings outside of race. You couldn't rent a hotel room in most places if you were not married regardless of race.
Though the latter story does get out the ol’ vote. I guess working class people with a mortgage are the Kulaks now.
That’s part of the problem, but this article is actually about explicit legal limits on sharing, not merely that sharing, where allowed, isn’t always legally convenient.
A private bedroom but shared living/cooking space is generally called a rooming/boarding house:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house
* https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/mult...
There is a separate contract with each tenant (i.e., multiple contracts), and each tenant is only responsible for paying for their private area.
This differs from a roommate situation in that there is generally one contract with the entire group.
Similarly with subletting: there is one contract with the landlord and the 'main' tenant, and then that tenant then turns around creates separate contract between them and another tenant.
Where I live there is discussion about allowing it in some neighborhoods, with the requirement that the property owner is also resident in the house.
In any case, there is _some_ limit to the number of occupants allowed to coreside in a given residence. States tend to codify minimum square footage requirements on a per-person basis to determine occupancy limits for a particular building.
Based on personal experiences I would say that it's only individual leases that are illegal. I lived in an SRO back in college without even realizing it was an SRO, rooms were rented out individually and everyone had a separate lease.
The more common version of this is to just do it privately with your friends or other people that you meet. If that's illegal then that will be news to me and like half my friends that currently live with roommates. Doing it privately raises a number of issues around housing discrimination. A landlord cannot stop you from renting a unit/room but there's nothing stopping a roommate from refusing to sign with you if they don't like some characteristic about you, granted in reality you probably wouldn't want to have that person as a roommate anyways.
Granted there might have been laws in place where I used to rent that capped the number of un-related folks living together but in my experience the landlord never brought it up, likely cause they knew enforcement would just never happen.
I did this in grad school BUT they were 100% separate leases (in NY state, not the city though). Not sure if the whole thing was just illegal or what TBH but that was the standard for apartments around the university.
Too many unrelated people living in a housing unit is illegal. Here’s San Francisco’s version of this law which was used to shut down house sharing companies such as HubHaus; see definition of “family” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...
The article also mentioned dormitory-like “group housing” apartments (which differ from housing units in that they don’t have a separate kitchen for each unit). San Francisco is pretty enlightened in that it allows group housing in many zoning districts, but even they have group housing density limits and now common space requirements which are designed to prevent much group housing (see definition of “group housing” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).
I was the one that actually 'owned' the house. No one paid rent to me, but I was reimbursed for all utilities, food, etc. My only expense was the mortgage.
Since no one paid rent, it wasn't a 'boarding house.'
A friend of mine was making $20 an hour at a part time manufacturing job while he had classes, and full time plus overtime during breaks. It would have been plenty for a down payment on such a house, if he'd wanted to, but he put the money towards tuition to limit school loans instead. This was 20 years ago, give or take, so very much not the norm, but definitely possible.
To add: I think a minimum down payment for the mortgage probably would have been in the $4 or $5,000 range.
Rent back in 1991 in the college town was around $600 per person and up... we made out like bandits but we did have to share cars.
The problem wasn't sketchy mortgages, it was the borderline fraudulent financial shenanigans after that.
What do you think was funding the sketchy mortgages? The fraudulent financial shenanigans
The others could have just stopped paying 'rent' and I would be stuck with the full mortgage...or I could have just sold the place and walked away with everything.
Definitely an exercise in trust and mutual self interest.
From what I hear, 2025 college kids aren't have anywhere near enough sex to be classified as such.
Like I can see why life in a house with 5 people might in some ways be more difficult than life in a house with 4 or 3, but I don't see why it should be illegal. People can think about these things for themselves and decide what works for them.
Sure, most houses won't accommodate 5 roommates, but there also a lot of extremely large houses in this country. Is there any benefit at all to having some weird, arbitrary 4 person cap? Like a cap per area of space might make sense, but just a limit of 4 regardless of anything?
Everything in the US is legally regulated to such an absurd degree. Where I live a gym needs a certain number of parking spaces per square feet. A clothing store needs a different number. A restaurant yet another different number. A business needs to have electrical outlets every so many feet. Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need? No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.
I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom" (because that's super effective).
If there's a grand old 6 bedroom house in a downtown area, it would probably make sense to allow 6 unrelated tenants. My only concern there would be homeowners subdividing rooms ad infinitum to get more tenants. But, there are probably solutions to that that don't involve arbitrary caps on household size.
It just drives me nuts that the average local politician doesn't seem to care about carefully designing regulations or pruning back the near endless stack of existing, poorly design regulations. We've been stacking stupid on stupid for more than 100 years and it makes doing anything in the real world (building a house, running a local business, etc...) pointlessly tortuous.
The parking thing I agree with. If you want to try to run a retail business without parking, good luck but you should not be prohibited from doing it.
But, generally, parking feels like something "the market" would solve pretty well sans regulation.
There are other fire safety rules in the US that are considered sacred, like residential buildings more than three floors having multiple staircases, but these building codes don't exist in Japan or Europe and fire deaths per capita are just about the same. Meanwhile, it significantly increases the cost of building housing in the US.
I imagine there are lots of places without this socket rule, and if some economist would look at the rates of electrical fires between these places, that would be amazing.
I just hate this pattern of regulation in general. Step 1: identify problem (some building materials can cause cancer). Step 2: Come up with some countermeasure (put a sign on every building saying that the building materials might cause cancer). And then they stop. They forgot step 3! Step 3: Check if your countermeasure actually did anything useful! Did cancer rates go down after prop 65? Yes, but when when you control for smoking rates, no, the effect of prop 65 seems to be nothing.
It's not a set number...Municipalities can set this as low as 2 or as high as whatever.
As to why - go and ask them? Presumably it's what the local voters wanted, or at least the most vocal ones that cared to show up to council meetings and such.
> I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom"
Chesterton's Fence.
The last people I expect to know how much of a resource they need are small business owners. Parking regulations are there when there isn't sufficient street or garage parking. It should be obvious that a restaurant needs more parking spots than say, a dry cleaner, so they shouldn't have the same burden. Parking capacity is inelastic, so if you under build then businesses and traffic suffer. Meanwhile if you overbuild, you're stuck maintaining empty parking lots and have inefficient use of space. It makes a ton of sense to me for this to be tightly regulated.
> No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.
I mean if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers. The outlet stuff comes from building codes like the IBC which is widely used (and as the saying goes, written in blood).
As always when you have a beef with your local government the solution is to get involved instead of complaining on the internet. The barrier to entry is shockingly low.
Unfortunately parking mandates and other building regulations are often set directly by politicians. There was some interesting insight into the political input to Seattle’s proposed planning updates last year - https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/16/planners-proposed-big...
No-one wants to live like MacArthur Park area in LA, that has 4x the density of Manhattan, NY, where every apartment has a shadow family that is evicted every year or two.
Sharing a house with too many people is illegal in many jurisdictions, yes. E.g., https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/urban-development/sf-housing...
(Note that this focusses on a rule on the number of legally-unrelated people that can legally live in a unit, but it also mentions in passing a separate restriction on the total number of people who can live in a unit irrespective of family relationships.)
Surely, the correct solution is just to put in some simple rules to bring the cost of housing down. For example: planning restrictions are suspended until the average family home hits 3x average family income. Rather than just packing us like sardines into ever more expensive houses.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
Right, you're just dragging in migration to the discussion, which is entirely a side issue, purely out of the goodness of your heart.
From your link:
> The UK has experienced broadly similar levels of migration compared to other high-income countries, on average, over the past few decades
That doesn't make it sound like the UK is an outlier, contrary to the implication of your statement.
The UK net immigration rate has been high relative to other countries worldwide, especially in recent years. It is an outlier on that basis. I'm not sure why you would limit the comparison to only high-income countries.
The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been identified as a cause of insufficient housebuilding activity, and new legislation is currently working its way through the House of Lords to alleviate this.
In the late 60s/70s DIY builders were almost completely displaced by developers who lobbied for regulations that stomped out "a guy and his pickup truck" by and large almost anywhere with desirable land. Then the owners of those houses reinforced same to prop up their property values.
I live in one of the last remaining counties that didn't do that, and last year I built a house for $60k. Pretty easy if you're in a place with essentially no codes or zoning. My (fairly) newlywed and I built the house with basically no experience either.
Funny someone else is allowed to discuss UK in regards to an American article, but I'm not allowed to discuss America on a UK thread about an American article.
The discussion about the effects of UK HMOs on wider housing availability is indeed a peripheral discussion of limited interest to most. Your comment, while of interest to me, was only tangentially related to my comment. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't have written it - as I said, I found it interesting - I'm just pointing out that it doesn't flow well from what came before it.
But then you're a billion miles from anywhere.
Demographics. Homeowners skew old, which gives them a bunch of advantages in enacting their political power. Higher turnout, baby boom giving them numerical superiority, and the time advantage of being able to enact policy decades ago.
In the US, this is supplemented by matters of race, where because of past redlining policies, "pro-homeowner" policy (esp. suburban single-family-homes) in the last half-century has been a way to primarily benefit white people.
No.
Being a homeowner doesn't grant one political influence. Being old grants one political influence.
It's the correlation of age and homeownership that means homeowners have the political influence the push through policy that drives up real estate prices.
Non-homeowners have political incentives all the same. If only just to oppose those very homeowners' policies. What they lack is the political influence to make it happen.
On top of that, more of those people vote than the renters in their area.
There's not really much more to it than that.
I assure you, a lot of people in the UK want house prices to fall too. There are too many renters who don't want to be renting, and the proportion is increasing. They wish they could buy instead, but can't either because of price, inability to save enough for a down-payment as fast as prices rise (while large rent rises impede their saving or even drain it, and incomes rise more slowly than prices), or inability to obtain a mortgage despite a history of consistently paying more than a mortgage in rent. For the latter category, who can afford a mortgage but can't get one, and are already paying more in rent, their main problem isn't income or price, it's the tighter restrictions on mortgage availability since the 2008 financial crises. But they would still like lower prices.
You have this wrong.
> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters
First lets look at homeownership rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S Home ownership is a functionally unmovable number staying around 63%
Home owners are in the majority.
Do you know what one of the biggest predictors of voting is? It is home ownership and local elections with zoning issues (or things that might impact home values) will drive turn out: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-...
Meanwhile to the original article, 80s TV like Golden Girls (shared housing) and Boosom Buddies (boarding houses) are quaint historic notes, the reality is that our use of housing stock has made the problem of where to live worse: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
When you dig down into the data, the article is highlighting a real problem. We have destroyed a lot of historical co-habitation that kept the system working and healthy. We did this with zoning (getting rid of high density to prop up home values) banning types of housing (dense single room, affordable) and making other types impossible (owning a home and renting a room or two, people dont do this because of tenants rights issues).
But you don't refute this, if anything you make the case that, since the majority are homeowners, they would of course want ever-increasing home values. And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
The 66 percent turn out rate is not that high period. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voter-turnou...
If non voting renters showed up, this could easily swing the other way. Renters are (generally) unmotivated to change their destiny at the voting booth.
> And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
This is far far far more complicated than it looks. Because what is inflation vs increase in value after adjustment. There are plenty of places where housing has gone down in value (see Detroit, see Camden NJ). There are plenty of places where gentrification has changed whole regions (see the SF Bay Area).
There has also been a massive change in what we build (smaller homes, vs McMansions).
When you dig into the WHY of this, the destruction of old stock is a huge part of it (see Detroit). Massive changes to what and how we build (back to home owners and zoning) limiting growth in areas. Over regulation (see slow rebuilding in southern CA after fires, and the whole housing shortage here). NOTE: the ADU law that was an attempt to let home owners fix this themselves has been somewhat of a flop... however it is gaining momentum.
The fixes to housing in the US require voters to pass something where only a bit more than half of it would be "good" for them and in a hard to explain way. It is easy to get them to vote such a policy down when the 40 percent that might impact them makes for a clear cut argument for a NO.
How many in the top 10% of the wealth distribution do you think are renters? How many in the bottom 20% do you think are homeowners?
Housing in UK/US seems to suffer from simultaneous under-and over- regulation. We over-regulate urban infill housing, and over-regulate the types of housing you can build. We under-regulate landowner profits by letting them keep land rents.
A holistic fix would address both causes of failure in the housing market.
This isn't correct. When a house is split into multiple flats, they're individual flats rented out under separate agreements and not a HMO.
A HMO is when that house is rented to a group of people who are unrelated to each other (i.e. not of the same 'household'). They are generally jointly and severally liable (under an AST). They each have a bedroom and share kitchen/bathroom/common areas. HMO's have stricter health & safety regulations. For example, doors must be the automatically closing fire doors that you get in public buildings.
That’s usually the case for student rentals but largely isn’t the case for professional rentals where each room is let separately
I think it probably depends on how the initial people moved in. If the estate agent is renting the rooms individually from the beginning it'll be separate agreements. If it's initially rented to a group of friends it's likely a joint AST and then re-assigned over the years as individuals change and the lease is renewed until you have a bunch of strangers jointly and severally liable (not a great idea).
It's kinda shocking that this is illegal in some countries otherwise considered "free." Why can I not live together with my friends?
The SRO bans went explicitly against a form of "hotel" really which was more individualistic.
An example is seen in Blues Brothers, before Carrie Fischer remodels it; probably to install higher density.
It's common in the United States, too.
This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.
Any college town will have houses full of college students. In my experience, the only enforcement actions were when landlords were renting out houses to more people than they had rooms, so they had situations where one person was living in a closet or an attic or other space that doesn't have proper fire egress. They don't mess around with that once it's discovered.
Let me introduce to the concept of rubber laws, a beloved tool of every totalitarian states. I now pass over to GPT:
“Rubber laws are vague catch-all offenses—like old vagrancy or ‘disorderly conduct’ laws on steroids. Because they’re so unclear, authorities can always say you broke one, and they use that flexibility to target inconvenient people. In the U.S., the Supreme Court generally strikes down such vague laws under the void-for-vagueness doctrine—but authoritarian systems keep them precisely because vagueness makes selective enforcement easy.”
Please don't do this.
Non-attributed data from LLMs (known for bullshitting) is not helpful.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...
This passage, in particular, is eye-opening:
> ... had SROs [single-room occupancies] grown since 1960 at about the same rate as the rest of the U.S. housing stock, the nation would have roughly 2.5 million more such units— enough to house every American experiencing homelessness in a recent federal count more than three times over.
Basically the solution is to density and build more housing in areas of high demand but it’s not unusual to hear of people arguing that this won’t fix the problem and that the answer is rent controls and additional restrictions and taxes on landlords.
Forced open bidding would make one big difference in pricing. But those high salaries just make everything more expensive.
No one who thinks we should legalize roommates and SROs is opposed to building more housing / densification; they're complementary.
https://www.gov.uk/renting-out-a-property/houses-in-multiple...
ish.., to the level of attention councils can afford to do so in an era of tight local government finances, and in the backdrop of limited housing stock making it difficult to refuse planning permission.
I ended up renting an office at a coworking space (which was much more expensive) before I found somebody interested, but I wonder, is this kind of arrangement common?
No.
They want $X per month, they don't want significantly less than $X per month.
In Portland, Oregon, a private single-person WeWork office is around $600/month. There are almost no roommate situations that are going to be available for that price.
I think the WeWork price now is $599 last I checked.
That's a benefit for other roommates, not the landlord. Unless the roommates are the ones subleasing, which is a lot less common.
There is 0 incentive/benefit for the landlord to accept an uncommon arrangement for less money.
Edited to add: I was also possibly talking to residents who were looking to sublease illegally. I didn’t ask.
If you need to own or rent a certain amount of land in order to attend the local school, then you can effectively keep out the poors (or even middle class, potentially).
Every affordable home I find inevitably has language that precludes buyers like me from owning it unless I’m willing to live alone or get married, and I’m just not willing to screw over friends like that. Thus, we rent instead of buy a starter condo and begin building equity.
It was mostly to stop the ‘10 adults to a house’ type situations that overwhelms street parking, sewage systems, etc. when everyone is doing it.
That’s what I’d like more people to understand: even if those rules or laws aren’t enforced now, doesn’t mean they can’t be enforced later when the regime changes its priorities.
When I was in high school a couple decades ago visiting liberal arts colleges across the Midwest, it was a common refrain that only fraternities had houses while sororities did not because they would be illegal (at least, historically).
its just a college town urban legend across the country, and at best a misinterpretation of the exact unrelated roommate zoning this article is about which don't specify gender
Fun how college bullshit becomes well-known fact over time.
And what decent person would ever want to object, if 95% of the victims are both "not like us", and members of lower classes?
One moment you allow multiple unrelated people to share a house.
Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard.
My peeve is about banning of growing food in your front yard in many states. So much available land going waste growing grass (that is not even fed to cows).
Next moment, you've got a rat infestation living 5 to a burrow and 8 of them are moving into your house.
My pet peeve is yet some other thing that might have downsides.
Which is why it's easy to get everyone together and ban backyard chickens because the whole town is sick of Bob's fucking rooster - but much harder to get them to unban them decades later.
Being from a community where the pro-nationalist movement has really taken hold, that sounds like a single, related family. Why do you give them special treatment?
So? Not your yard, not your business.
>Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard.
Is it on their property? If so not my problem.
Having principals and sticking to them makes reasoning about the subjects so easy.
Come on - zoning rules aren't some tool of repression. Sometimes they can be, but that isn't their raison d'etre.
Want to only allow single-family residences?
Fine, but pay the city taxes on that privilege. Then use those funds to offset the negative externality.
Good luck.
Major urban centers have enough renters to form a voting bloc, and this is where such a policy could be useful to increase housing supply.
Maybe, but voting would only matter if there was a referendum, which is highly unlikely for something that isn't challenging fundamental rights. Taxes are easily repealed if the people realize they made a mistake. It not need that kind of level of agreement.
What does matter is having time to participate in democracy. It very well may be that in theory the renting crowd have a loud enough voice to be heard, but in practice do they really have the time/the feeling of having enough time to actually do it? Statistically, renters are lower income and tend to struggle to make ends meet. While making themselves heard would be beneficial, often they face other pressures, like needing to go to work, instead that diminish their ability to carry through with it.
Fun fact: In some college towns, they can only have fraternity houses but not sorority houses, because they still have laws on the books that define a house of prostitution as any house with at least three unrelated women living there.
I know of single room rentals available in pretty much every major metro in the world. Shared common bathroom and kitchen.
I also know of one in plenty of subletting of multi-bedroom apartments.
I have never heard of enforcement against this. It also doesn’t bring rents down as much as claimed.
Because eventually individual rooms start being rented by families. Next you have four families living in a single-family occupancy location and there is a huge fire hazard. I've seen this happen in NYC growing up, and its super dangerous. I also empathize with the other side -- as a poor person you may have no other option.
It’s not at all clear to me that four families in a single family-intended house is worse than the alternatives. (Building more housing is the long-term solution, of course…)
Therefore regulating housing is quite possible to only make things less safe, as people end up giving up money for healthy food / education / healthcare / dentistry etc to fund the trumped up "enviromental study" "planning and zoning" "code" and other requirements that might not best fit their budget.
You aren't in the neighborhoods where this has been in place. But it doesn't mean its not happening.
I'm not sure if this an actual law but housing listings often imply its forbidden in the neighborhood, they're looking for couples and families with kids.
The landlord believes that their property and their relationships with the neighbours of the property will be less likely to destroyed by letting the property to older/respected/settled down members of society. Common practice in most of UK as well.
In practice I think it's about impossible to enforce. Code enforcement or police would need a warrant to enter, and in most jurisdictions the complaints are public record far enough ahead of time anyone with the slightest bit of foresight would get ahead of it.
In my county sometimes I monitor the local complaints, mostly initially when I was looking at properties because I did not want to live next to a neighbor who likes to be a busybody to the code enforcement. There are a number of properties that just lock their gates whenever a code complaints happen or tell code inspection to kick rocks, by the time they come back with a warrant the situation is faked well enough they can't do anything.
If they have a suspicion and they feel inclined to go after you they'll just go hard enforcing all manner of other shit they don't need to go inside to enforce agains the landlord. It doesn't matter that the things they're trying to enforce may very well be bullshit that couldn't stand in court if challenged, it's cheaper to comply than to fight it.
Code enforcement and other civil and administrative areas of law where the .gov can issue fines on the same order or larger than many criminal penalties while giving the accused none of the rights of criminal trial are a massive, massive, massive, I can't say it enough, massive, end run around constitutional rights.
https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/brandon-fugal
https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/alexis-osmond
https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_...
And don't get me wrong SROs were not happy places, people living in them should just try not being to poor to have real housing (sarcasm). I think homeless issues would not be solved but at least partially mitigated if SROs with regulations could exist. I think we need to look serious at whether people living and shitting on the streets is more or less dignified than SROs
Yes, unironically, they should. And most would be trying to do exactly that.
I don’t know why some people treat economic status as some immutable property outside of your control. People move up and down in economic status all the time. And most people move up as they get older and get more work experience and higher paying jobs.
Having a stable place to live with a physical address instead of a tent, and possibly being around other people who are trying to improve their lives instead of a bunch of drug addicts would absolutely help people “not be poor”.
Some of the homeless could live in a roommate situation. Others are "so far gone" that no reasonable person would want to live with them, and they would destroy a room if allowed in one without supervision.
Homelessness is a hard problem. Anyone claiming they have a solution is wrong. However that doesn't mean we shouldn't try - just because you can't solve the problem doesn't mean you can't make things better for a subset.
My uncle once had a tenant smear feces on the wall before leaving it was nasty but that person was homeless and I don't think think that had mental illness beyond having a break down. I think they lost there job and it was a hard time for them. Still the wall was nasty.
Ultimately SROs do not solve homelessness hence the mitigating it factor if it solves 30% of the homeless problem that would be amazing
If they had to pay rent they would at least be filtering for people who have enough stability/responsibility to have some kind of job or income.
"Just give them housing" does not work for people who have no idea how or desire to live in a house.
Living/loitering/begging/shitting on the streets should not be permitted. Institutionalization may be needed if addictions or severe mental health issues are involved. But expectations need to be higher. Sympathy for and tolerance of antisocial behavior have been utter failures.
I don't have a good answer to the problem.
But one of the big problems is that almost all of them forbid drugs, the very high they want, so they're a non-starter.
You probably need something like "drug towns" in the California desert that provide comfortable places to overdose to death. Good luck running on that!
It would also usually have the landlord living there, and they would be invested in the place because it's their source of income, so they aren't going to tolerate people smearing crap all over the walls or tearing out the wiring to sell for drugs or ranting and raving all night long.
Entropy. The fact that change happens doesn't prove that we control it.
Your wealth and health are randomized when you're born. What you do later has miniscule influence.
This is the experience of many. The speed of the conveyor belt is why people can easily imagine falling behind (thats the diffult state!) while moving ahead is almost impossible. (It doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. From time to time someone finds a jetpack and propels themselves onto places where the conveyor belt is working slightly differently, but thats not going to be the experience of everyone.)
> To stay in one place one must do the right things at all times and also be lucky enough that no bad things happen to you.
"do the right things" is really not that hard. It mostly involves not doing things like getting arrested, getting addicted to drugs, or otherwise making bad choices. It's not some crazy delicate balancing act that you're making it out to be.
Which means that for many it's not a financial problem, it's a self-control problem.
I can't afford to save, but I can afford to pay 10-20% extra on everything through credit cards.
Most people living with roommates don't want that situation (here I distiguish roomates from someone you have a romantic tie with), but it is the best compromise. Roommates save money which is important when you don't have enough (hint almost nobody has enough money - even billionairs sometimes have to not buy something they want because their budget can't afford it)
SRO would solve a lot of problems. There are some people that is the only living situation they could afford. There are some people who want to spend their money on other things and so the savings from SRO enables that other thing they want. Many of those latter will "settle down and get married" in a few years thus changing their life situation, that is okay, life is not static.
If you refuse to acknowledge the problem, you're doomed to repeat the cycle again when the problems start happening again.
(Many of the problems can be mitigated against if you admit they exist, and work with them.)
Regulations are why they don't exist. Once you pile on everyone's additions to the bike shed it's an economic non starter.
In terms of dignity, the scale goes, from less to more dignified:
1. Homelessness (at least, being on the street) 2. Informal subletting 3. SROs
Furthermore, dignity is not the only variable we need to consider. The rise in unsheltered homeless has resulted in a commensurate rise of hostile architecture - i.e. physical DRM to prevent homeless people from pirating the concept of shelter. This has measurably reduced the quality of public spaces, transit, and intercity travel. It would be better for society if we didn't do this.
With the rise of airbnb and the problems with those kinds of situations, I get why people don't want that.
I lived in a place where we had a lot of amateur hour landlords and they were terrible at it. Trash, noise, parking and even crime problems. We banned short term rentals and rentals in general (some exceptions allowed) because of problems with those situations.
However, many states and/or cities do limit the number of unrelated individuals living together, and this applies whether they are all on the lease, subletted, or even in one's privately owned home. A brief search shows different areas have limits of no more than 2, 3, 4 or 5 unrelated individuals.
I've just happened to live in places that allow 4 or 5 unrelated individuals, and never rented a house with more than that many bedrooms/roomates.
It is crazy to me that in some parts of the country it is fine to have 7 family members living together (easy to do in a multigenerational home), but letting 3 friends live with me in the same size house that I own is illegal.
It's obvious what they're trying to do but if you had 12 kids with 12 women would all of them living in the same house be illegal?
I assume these laws have stayed for other reasons.
Does this mean in the US apartments have as many bathrooms as bedrooms?
2 bedroom apartments are the most common IIRC, and those usually have 1.5 or 2 bathrooms (a "public" and a "private" where a half bath is a shitter/sink no shower/bath).
3 bedrooms usually have 2 but sometimes 3 (a public - by public I mean the one the guests would use - a "master" or ensuite one INSIDE the biggest room, and sometimes a jack-and-jill between two other rooms).
I think this regulation is specific for subletting rooms, e.g., you can't force someone to share a bathroom with someone they don't share a bedroom with.
... Huh, it never even really occurred to me that anywhere banned this.
The only difference is dogs shit outside, they still get private bathrooms!
Getting a place to live in for $350/mo would be absolutely game changing for low income (and even middle income) people trying to build wealth. The downside though is that these places will invariably turn into social crack houses, rather than the sunny smilely communal life ideals they are sold as.
If someone wants to waste his life away, sitting around doing drugs, that should be up to him.
Ok, get rid of them, now the streets are social crack houses? What are we to do now? Perhaps the woodchipper?
If we were living in pre-agrarian society you would either be on the "work treadmill" building/maintaining shelter and finding food or you would starve or freeze to death. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Do you think animals spend most of their time looking for food because they're also operating under the capitalist system?
It is my understanding that anthropology has shown that the people of prehistoric times cared for their sick, elderly, and infirm.
> "From the very earliest times, we can see evidence that people who were unable to function were helped, looked after and given what care was available."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/8788963...
[1] https://www.scielo.br/j/csp/a/kPn9cHW4RWKz94CjxDBw3ds/?forma...
This phrase is doing so much heavy lifting as to actively mislead people (i.e. lie with plausible deniability).
Take a subsistence farming community for example. If there aren't enough calories in the stockpile to feed everyone over the winter deficit they're gonna realize this in the fall and the less productive people will get their food rationed first and hardest and odds are some of the old (so like 50s) or otherwise infirm people who are in this huge calorie deficit are gonna keel over from a minor cold or something during the winter. The calorie math is what is and no amount of "well they cared for the elderly when times were good" misdirection is going to change the raw math of how frequently times were bad and the number of elderly, infirm, etc, that a society routinely subject to those sorts of "purge lite" events is going to be carrying at any one time.
I am not aware of any viable life option that doesn't involve the need to work a lot. Besides being born into a trust fund or being content with homelessness.
Based on how much people pay for even absolute shithole desert wasteland where I live, I can tell you there'd be a huge demand for homesteading federal BLM or other land if they'd reopen it. It would definitely help people who can't afford to get land on their own.
Addiction requires some level of coercive intervention to address. No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
I have family member suffering from extreme mental illness. He is likely on the streets somewhere, we don't know where because we had no choice but to abandon him to save ourselves. United States makes it extremely difficult to force treatment for someone who can't be making these decisions on their own ever. He ended up in this cycle. Mental Health Episode, Drugs, Law Enforcement interactions trying to get drugs (Robbing people), some minor help, slightly better, stops medications because side effects, repeat.
Funding it is always crazy expensive and in United States with crappy social safety net, it's really hard to find funding and politically, people don't want to fund it because "I'm barely affording rent and you want to raise my taxes to pay for them? Hell no."
Mark followed a bunch of homeless people in Skid Row as well as providing assistance to them and documenting it all through interviews.
The problem is so much (soooo much) deeper and worse than the surface level virtuous hand waving of "Just give them food and shelter and the problem is fixed".
That is correct, yet at the same time: Society as a whole refuses to give these people even the kindness of a roof over their head.
They need better care, yes. But if people won't even agree that these people shouldn't freeze to death in winter (or overheat in summer), talk of funding better care is off the table.
Christ, Fox News had one of their guys outright suggest they be euthanized. The bar for discourse on homelessness is in hell right now.
> The homelessness response system added 60,143 shelter beds in 2024, but with over 600,000 people entering homelessness for the first time each year, this is deeply inadequate.
> In 61 percent of states and territories, growth in demand outpaced growth in available beds, meaning that they had less capacity to shelter people in 2024 than in 2023.
I have to imagine that at 10% of the rental market there had to be tons of drugs being done within SROs. But also that a lot of drugs were being done in the other 90% of the rental market ...
I come from a "big" family, and I am used to movement where I live. And living alone or just with one person, makes my energy go down.
Now that I plan on moving to Paraguay, I am looking for co-living options or someone to rent place with. Different people have different preferred ways of living.
For me, it's cheaper, and I am happier, when I share place with other people. Also, you get to learn from others, have people to talk with, at the expense of a bit of privacy. But depending on the roommates you choose the privacy thing is usually not an issue.
Perspective: My mother owned a home in a wealthy area of Virginia, her mortgage was $1200/mo for 30 years. When she sold it (for double what she paid for it) she thought she was rich. Then came the assisted living rent bill of $8k/mo. She realized she only has a few years to live on her life savings. It's a generational rug pull and kicking the ladder out from those climbing. It's going to end very badly.
Not sure where you / other siblings are based but find a place w good and cheap flight connections.
Changing sucks. Being forced to change even worse so maybe talk about options
(Or even a cheaper place in the usa)
Good luck
In this case, the article contains the reason:
"as SROs disappeared, ... homelessness exploded nationwide."
Looks like SROs weren't being used by scientists and scholors.
You're saying SROs were banned specifically to increase homelessness? Is this a discarded Bond movie plot?
People fleeing domestic abuse with reasonable means need to have options, because the domestic violence shelters can't be expected to accommodate everyone for the whole time a divorce takes (which in some situations can be multiple years).
I think these laws are built with at least some creedence.
Furthermore it's a false conclusion that the primary reason they are in tents by the river is because they couldn't find a cheap hostel. Maybe they are psychotic, or addicted, or don't like being around people. Maybe they would burn the hostel down or flood it trying to fight their psychoses.