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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't make this clear... is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?

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).

View on HN

Part of the problem is the law isn't designed for shared housing.

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.

> 2/ From a legal discriminatory standpoint, the law doesn't have much protections for people blocking certain raises or genders from renting.

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.

Some freedom? My house is my safe space, it's the place I go when I'm exhausted, when I'm sick, when the rest of the world sucks.

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.

If you want that degree of freedom, a boarding house or shared occupancy is not for you. Pay up for dedicated solo housing.

The amount of people in a boarding house or shared occupancy is low enough that they can easily be all mutually trusted friends or acquaintances to one another. Why should people be forced by law to admit strangers that they might not be fully comfortable with into that kind of tightly-knit arrangement?

In a true boarding house, the landlord/owner controls who lives there - each room is rented individually. Individual tenants have zero control over who lives in the next room.

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).

Actually, if they rent the home, then they still don't have that control. The landlord does. S/he is free to put someone you don't like in the upstairs unit. Or even in the 5th bedroom of the house if it's a room letting type situation.

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 a group of tenants and the landlord all sign a "joint and several" lease for a house or multibedroom apartment, nobody can make changes until that lease agreement expires (at least not without the agreement of everyone on the lease).

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.

Material point is that people are misapprehending the direction of control here.

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.

Yeah, you're being way more pedantic than I was a few posts up.

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.

As a practical matter, the landlord will be happy to lease to any group of people who all want to live with each other and who are financially qualified to pay the rent.

And if the landlord is being selective on the basis of race or other protected class, that's flat-out illegal.

> 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.

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).

Depends on where and local laws. In San Francisco you can swap roommates out one for one and they landlord can not reasonably stop you. They can request an application if they want but they can’t reject them unless they have a very good reason. Most landlords don’t bother to waste their time.

Or just be free to choose your roommates.

> Probably an unpopular opinion, but why is this a problem?

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.

You can't find a group of people to share a lease with, but you want to live in a residence which excludes people by race or gender? Sounds like a you problem.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. The typical roommate situation around here is between two or four in one unit. Maybe it was harder in the days before the internet, but I expect that even then the kinds of tight-knit religious communities that would be opposed to cohabiting outside the faith would have the internal social networking infrastructure to solve this problem.

How does social media solve the issue? I don't think it matters if the landlord or the tenant is advertising sexist/racist housing opportunities, its still sexist and racist, blocking certain groups from accessing housing.

Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.

> How does social media solve the issue?

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.

You mentioned the internet. Way more people look for housing on social media than on church websites.

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.

There are a significant amount of people who care about gender such that it makes sense for landlords to discriminate by shared unit. They should have a mix of male only and female only units. (and if they want mix units). In the US not enough people care about the religion of their roommate to be worthwhile trying to find a fair solution to those who care (if you do care you can ask at your church).

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 problem currently isn't the landlords, but the tenants and subtenants. Maybe if landlords could offer more shared housing, this problem would go away. But tenants frequently look for people of the same gender or race to rent a shared housing.

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.

> The solution to the “female only”

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.

Forcing things to go through the full ass reaming of the "everything else" process rather than whatever less terrible process was written to make some "supported" thing streamlined enough to not cause uproar.

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.

These are challenges for people sharing housing, but they're not the legal reason why letting out rooms is illegal. Prohibitions on multifamily housing are all rooted in racial animus. It's the entire reason we have single-family zoning (a related legal proscription), which emerged very shortly after the Buchanan v Warley decision that outlawed outright racial zoning. There's a long and well-documented history of this, all the way down to regulations targeting multi-generational households (Black and Latino families are more likely to have a grandparent or aunt living alongside a younger family).

"The Color of Law" is a good starter read here.

>There's a long and well-documented history of this, all the way down to regulations targeting multi-generational households (Black and Latino families are more likely to have a grandparent or aunt living alongside a younger family).

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.

Or they're targeting polyamory.

tptacek nailed it with regards to it being historically racial, but I've also seen, to your point, animosity towards anything that isn't a "traditional" or nuclear family. Fear of the different and unknown is a powerful motivator of the people who bring these complaints. Also animosity towards poverty and the belief or perception of material increases in crime and/or traffic.

(property owner, many units, yimby, have to interface with the citizenry at zoning meetings, etc)

I'm sure in some/many cases there were racial motivations but also SROs that have many unrelated people in individual rooms often become seen as flophouses and are seen as undesirable by other property owners. So they are often prohibited at least in single-family zoned areas.

Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.

(as someone who has acquired lots, rezoned, and have contracted to have multifamily built in such areas)

I do agree that one contributor to the housing crisis in many areas is the lack of SRO and boarding houses, which used to be much more common at least in urban areas. Those are all largely gone now, and they used to be common entry-level housing options for young singles.

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.

Property owners absolutely are entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density, and I say this as someone who also has done similar work to you.

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.

> If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right

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.

https://www.yimbylaw.org/

I disagree that people are entitled to affordable housing where they desire to live. There are neighborhoods I could not afford to live in, and I am not entitled to live there. I live where I can afford, and this is the case up and down the market. If I want to live in some community, it's up to me to be able to afford it.

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.

The issue isn't that some communities are expensive. The issue is the deliberate engineering of extra housing expense extrinsic to the market itself using the force of law, which is a capability home rule grants exclusionary communities if not policed carefully.

It's an inherent right, otherwise CA wouldn't have to pass laws to override it (which is an overreach IMO).

No one is entitled to affordable housing in any specific location.

> If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right

I’d be interested as to any country that recognizes this as an explicit right.

Explicit? Probably not. But zoning is handled at the local level traditionally.

No it isn't.

Well consider me convinced by your thoughtful response!

I guess that overrides centuries of precedent.

There's been centuries of precedent for all sorts of things we'd recoil from now.

A community of SFH residences makes you recoil? You're an extreme minority if so, which makes this no better than your initial statement.

>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.

The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.

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.

Indeed, they want the authority over the land without buying or otherwise having to expend finances to control the land.

That's not what I'm talking about at all. Zoning regulations should reflect the desires of a community, and there's no inherent reason they can't be more restrictive than yimbys would like.

you used the word "entitled" though, and that has a specific meaning. why would nimbys be "entitled" to stop high density housing but yimbys not be "entitled" to do it? this contradiction resolves itself very neatly in a system where yimbys get to do what they want with their property and nimbys get to do what they want with theirs. It only gets complex when one person wants complete control of their property and also partial control over someone else's, and they dress up their own personal best interest as "the desires of the community".

Because "yimby"s go to higher government to force localities to adopt rules they vote against, i.e. they get their way with authoritarian policies that apply outside of "their backyard". Some even think there should be national laws! They want their policies applied to essentially an entire continent. Nimbys typically don't care about things that are not part of their locality. San Francisco wants giant skyscrapers? Cool, none in my city, thanks. That's why we chose to live in an area that bans high density.

From what I've seen the actual policies being pushed by "yimbys" seem much closer to yiyby.

And this is because individual property rights must not be sacrosanct in a civilized society.

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.

We should probably try to keep them to a minimum though, lest we stifle innovation. You wouldn't want to stifle innovation, would you? Or inadvertently destroy shareholder value?

> Nimbys typically don't care about things that are not part of their locality

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.

Obviously I don't care about that freedom. Just like I don't care about the freedom to put up ugly billboards on your land. That's why we bought a home in an area that bans those things. It also requires ugly parking lots to be set back behind a tree line, and new residential developments must have bike trails that connect to the wider network. I'm happy for you to live somewhere where you have that freedom though. I know "no rules" appeals to some!

So you don't care about other people's freedoms but yimbys are bad because they're "authoritarian". Got it, totally cool, logical, and consistent.

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.

Yeah that's why I moved somewhere where those were the agreed local regulations and everyone else was on the same page. That's why local governance is good. Everyone can find somewhere where they can be happy.

> everyone else was on the same page

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.

I don't subscribe to pure anarchism. We also have local public schools, parks, libraries, bike trails, etc. funded by "other people's" (our) pockets. It's fine. The US at least has 10 million sq km. Plenty of room for different types of communities to exist. The are cities in multiple directions a few miles away with less restrictive zoning if people like the area but want apartments, townhomes, or advertising.

> We also have local public schools, parks, libraries, bike trails, etc. funded by "other people's" (our) 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.

There are all kinds of desires local communities might have that are proscribed by state law. Why should this one be different? If you don't want those laws passed, organize for a candidate who will oppose them. If the state goes the other way on a land-use issue within that state, it's hard for me to see why there's some moral mandate that local NIMBYs be allowed to overrule them.

> Zoning regulations should reflect the desires of a community

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.

No, the existing community made decisions that already exist.

Potential new residents should have no say, and actual new residents knew what they were before they purchased the property.

The whole theoretical conception of property rights is that a property right is the right to control what happens on your property, which implies you don't have the right to control what happens on other people's property, because that right belongs to other people. You can't eat your cake and have it.

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?

My neighborhood does in fact ban any kind of front yard fence, and I'd have to check but the only backyard fences I recall seeing are those around pools, which are legally required for child safety reasons.

This is just a tragedy of the commons situation.

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.

> Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them.

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.

Exactly. Most people don't buy a home with the hope that the surroundings will change drastically. And of course is there is a change for the better, the same people who complain about about NIMBYs will complain about gentrification.

Severely limiting the property rights of anyone owning land there doesn’t necessarily seem reasonable

It's not a severe limitation to tell someone that everyone who lives in an area agreed to something that they'll have to adhere to if they want to live there also.

It obvious is. I’am not saying whether collectivism is good or bad, though.

> The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.

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.

Barring restrictions is absolutely not “forcing” anyone to do anything. Take away all restrictions on my lot and I am still not forced to develop on it.

A law negating a covenant everyone entered into willingly and freely does kinda alter the deal after its made. I do wholeheartedly agree that removing zoning restrictions doesn't impinge on anyone's liberty though.

Covenants are already heavily regulated and have a pretty icky history in the US.

> and freely

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?

We allow all sorts of encumbrances to transfer with property. You can sell a house with an easement that lets neighbors use some amount of your property for access, with a tenant who has a contractual right to stay to the end of a lease regardless of what the new owner wants, or with a covenant to limit development. Hell, a couple years back an entire mall sold for $20 with the agreement that the buyer was assuming all of the seller's debt and also the seller's contractual obligation to perform road maintenance. If you couldn't transfer these agreements with a sale they'd be useless even absent a sale. Either no one would buy the property because its unsellable and the value would plummet or you would buy it with the encumbrances, transfer ownership from your left hand to your right hand to remove them and then do what you want.

Let me know your address so I can buy the adjacent properties and force you to live next to a landfill or move away from your now-worthless home.

It may surprise you but I’m not actually scared of that happening. I’m actually zoned for the house next door to me to turn into a seven story building, which many in my city think is horrifying, but I’m not scared of that either.

If you legitimately would have no issues being surrounded by a landfill, you're such an outlier that your opinion is basically meaningless.

You’re jumping to conclusions. I didn’t say I wouldn’t have any issue with it; I said I’m not scared it’s going to happen.

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.

Honestly the biggest reason I became a pro-density advocate is because low-density communities are almost always tax-revenue-negative[1], given that the cost of things like roads, water and sewer infrastructure scale with land area. What NIMBYs often seem to want are the amenities of city living (like a sewer instead of a septic tank in your yard) without the people, and that just doesn’t work.

[1]: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI

The suburbs I've lived in have spent far more on things that scale with population (primarily education) than things that scale with area. You also can't split revenue from downtown commercial areas out from surrounding residential like that. Are businesses "subsidizing" residents? Of course not. That doesn't even make sense as a question.

Posting a video from a highly biased source is not very convincing.

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.

Look, the people making this argument all come from a fairly aligned political unit. If you start hearing this perspective from a broad coalition of ideologically diverse groups, it would mean the thesis has become consensus. I agree with you that the guy's tone is not great, so here's a slightly different framing: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/4/17/sprawl-is-... (strong towns' emphasis is on ending federal infrastructure loans that leave cities and suburbs with infrastructure they don't have the tax base to maintain over a generation. Which I think leads to similar conclusions but they're careful not to say 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.

I'm a big fan of StrongTowns and this is the article that NotjustBikes used as a launching point for the specific episode of fuckcars porn that you posted: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017-1-9-the-real-reason...

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.

> Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.

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.

People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change. This is very understandable. Using force of law to maintain aesthetic levels and social class divides is where the perverse incentives set in. The US Supreme Court approved the earliest zoning laws based on health justification. The dicta in the court opinion cited cities as parasitically infringing on bucolic greenery. We now see the logical endpoint of restrictive zoning. Million dollar houses that are mostly the right to live at that address (the structure is small and worn). Landlords having tremendous power over tenants.

>People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change.

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 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.

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.

> 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 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.

OK, now extend that line of thought just a little bit further.

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.

There's nothing intrinsically racist about having lot size preferences, but the lot sizes we have in most 20th century vintage zoning codes are in fact racist by design. Minimum lot sizes were a way of keeping Black families from crossing borders from redlined ghettoes into white neighborhoods or suburbs, by preventing people from subdividing lots into smaller, more affordable houses.

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 entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.

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.

it's called an HOA or a master planned community and its a voluntary agreement between homeowners, not something any one homeowner is entitled to over the protestations of others. People who want to join an HOA are entitled to do that, and people who don't are entitled to not, but that's different from the law because the law is not optional or voluntary. It is, by its very nature, a restriction on the liberties of people without their express consent. What you're talking about is very, very different and deserves to be discussed independently of this.

Most people who engage in a HOA do so because existing regulation requires newly developed subdivisions to create their own local government to do the work of providing streets, etc, that should be done by the existing city government.

Sure, but part of the point of in-effect racist zoning policies is that the affected population is predominately the targeted minority. It would be more effective and more equitable to address the actual issues created by flophouses.

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.

When things are seen as undesirable by property owners and we want to understand why, the reason is almost always racism.

See also: HOAs, school districting, road construction, railroad construction, gentrification...

That's just America.

The whole race thing is a red herring. Pretty much every "racist" law outside of the former confederacy was written with the Irish in mind and last I checked they were just as white (technically whiter if you want to hair split) as the wasps who championed those laws.

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).

This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism.

> 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 "?

>This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism.

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.

Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind. But much of American zoning post-WW2 is a reaction to the Great Migration and concomitant phenomena like redlining, which created new neighborhood and municipal borders that were defended in part by shrink-wrapping inhospitable zoning codes around existing residents.

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.

>Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind.

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.

> 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

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.

You can just Google this. He's pretty famous!

https://nextstl.com/2021/04/harland-bartholomew-destroyer-of...

Yeah, that's how I knew that he was born 13 years after the establishment of the city's modern borders and that your original claim is incorrect (and, incidentally, not corroborated by the result of your quick google search, which doesn't even attempt to suggest that he had anything to do with the city's "ring suburb design").

Note that the Irish were not considered white throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and into the early 20th century. See eg. "How the Irish became white":

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.

One thing you can never depend on racists for is consistency.

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?"

Just for curiosity's sake, when you talk about Italians being widely considered white what context is that in? Because you later talk about anti-Irish racism in the US in the 20s and 30s and the experience was pretty similar for Italians in the US in that time period as well. I have living relatives that can give you firsthand accounts of open, organized, violent anti-Italian racism in Pittsburgh pre-mid WWII.

I mean modern day. What I'm trying to express is that "nobody today would be racist against $whateverGroup$!" has precisely zero bearing on what absolute batshit lunacy people were racist about even 50 years ago.

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.

This is BS, and race was absolutely part of the equation. The covenants to my parent's house in the SFBAY literally say no black people can live on the property unless they're servants. It's no longer enforceable today, but it absolutely was when their house was newly built.

That is a different point not related.

A black family or single person could not live in that location. We are talking about 4 unrelated people.

I don't know what the racial origins are, but I have grown skeptical of many racial explanations, because they're often simplistic, speculative, and often lack a comprehension and awareness of the greater social context and events occurring around the middle of the century, like the intentional weaponization of "racism" against ethnic neighborhoods that were not assimilating into the ever-nebulous category of "whiteness". (Mass migration is one classic instrument, as are highways and bad urban planning. In the first case, mass migration from the South was used to break up ethnic neighborhoods in the North, causing their scattering across the suburbs to hasten assimilation. You could have used practically any outside group, but the convenience here was that it exploited the moral high ground of the civil rights movement, allowing opposition to mass migration to be cast as an expression of racism.)

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.

Why are the cities that you happen to have lived in a relevant data set here?

Why aren't they? Because what appears to have been an obvious point to everyone else isn't you you:

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?

> it's targeting slumlords, not the renters.

That's the stated reason. The real reason is of course to target the renters who cannot afford anything else.

He didn't say all prohibitions rooted in racial animus targeted multi generational households. I knew a city where people said they supported unrelated tenant restrictions because they didn't want migrant workers living in their neighborhoods.

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.

"Prohibitions on multifamily housing are all rooted in racial animus". That's not true even if part of your statement is true.

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.

I’m pretty sure the law has a lot more to do with existing property owners trying to preserve the value of their own property, than it has to do with lobbyists hating Democrat party bloc voters for literally no reason at all.

Though the latter story does get out the ol’ vote. I guess working class people with a mortgage are the Kulaks now.

We're discussing zoning codes that were essentially set in the 1940s and 50s, and have only been incrementally adjusted since then. "Democrat/Republican" wasn't a salient distinction for this issue at the time (and much of the Democratic base had the opposite racial salience.)

So, people were not allowed to have their grandparent live in the same household as the parents? That seems awfully bad for social health.

A grandparent is the parent's parent, so that would be fine by all the variations that I've seen.

> Part of the problem is the law isn't designed for shared housing

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.

One interesting thing about roommates is the landlord can't discriminate, but the roommates can discriminate against other roommates on any basis they want if they reside in the same dwelling, at least in the U.S.

even more confusing: landlord occupied housing.

In my experience, it's a lot easier to kick out a roommate than a tenant. If you share a kitchen or a bathroom with somebody, then most tenant protection laws don't apply. Once you share a bathroom or kitchen, then "not getting along" is enough of an excuse for it to become a safety issue.

> is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?

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...).

Meanwhile, people build tiny homes to "solve homelessness"...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yJsWjulAonc

Why the scare quotes? What else is supposed to be done when every other remedy is either illegal or too expensive!

Typically it’s two per bedroom plus one. The max occupancy is set on the lease.

> The article doesn't make this clear... is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?

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.

My impression is that boarding house usually includes some services (cleaning, maintenance, food) from the owner or an employee who lives on the premises.

The “board” in a boarding house is food. There can be other services as well, but food is definitely required to be a boarding house.

Yes, the situation with shared common areas and private bedrooms individually leased is more typically called "single room occupancy" (SRO) and is often prohibited by local rental codes.

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.

I'm not an expert on the legal mechanisms but I believe it's a combination of all of those things through a hodgepodge of various local zoning regulations which the article references: limits on the number of unrelated people living in the same home where the limit varies by locality (i've always heard of these as anti-brothel regulations). Limits on number of leases in a single space or requirements for each leasable unit to have its own bathroom and/or kitchen. Requirements that each tenant have their own parking space. Lots of creative ways cooked up by local regulators across the vast USA to discourage anything but single-family homes occupied by single families.

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!

> or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room

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’m not sure what the article is complaining about. I know 2 per bedroom is widely allowed in the US. But more isn’t. It seems like the article is looking to revitalize the concept of a large dormitory where people mostly just come to sleep. Maybe I’m wrong but the article doesn’t do a good job of saying what the problem is.

Either way I don’t think most millennials want more than 2 per room anyway.

> I’m not sure what the article is complaining about.

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."

The problem is that there's a "housing crisis" (which really just means that desirable places are more expensive than people would like for the most part, because homelessness is not up significantly since that term became popular to my knowledge) largely created by a lack of new housing starts in those areas, and existing laws bar people from circumventing that with alternative arrangements.

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.

It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.

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).

I agree - I only meant reasonable in relation to typical home sizes.

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.

Normally the rules for minimum square footage for a "bedroom" and the requirement for a window would limit the amount of internal room dividing that could happen.

Sure, like I mentioned in my post above it could be based on square feet. Or the number of toilets. Or bedrooms with windows. Or any number of other things and I would be sympathetic.

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.

Or, you could let people decide how large a bedroom they are willing to rent and stop micromanaging/over-regulating every bit of real estate, which is why the costs are too high.

The original intent of such regulations was not having tenements where people would perish in event of a fire. In 2016 36 people died in the Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.

The electrical outlet requirement is for fire prevention, to reduce the use of long extension cords and people using multi-outlet adaptors.

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.

It might actually do better with less parking... as that can lead to a more pleasurable pedestrian experience. Of course, that requires a certain level of density and proximity to housing (or common/shared parking).

But, generally, parking feels like something "the market" would solve pretty well sans regulation.

Well, I didn't know the origin, that's interesting. I'm still very skeptical of the rule.

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 seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.

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.

> Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need?

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.

> if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers

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...

Other university story: the frats at my uni had frat houses, physical biuldings, but sororities did not (circa 2000). The frats bought decades previous, when houses were affordable. The sororities of the time could not. There was an ancient rule that more than X unrelated females sharing an independant house constituted a brothel. That law was ancient history, but the sororities missed the oppertunity to purchase land near the university and, i believe, to this day operate without fixed houses.

> Immediately post-college, I shared houses with other 20-somethings. It was always a single lease

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.

> The article doesn't make this clear... is sharing a house illegal

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.)

The article opens talking about boarding houses and moves on to discuss single-room occupancies which are the rental afforded by boarding houses. It is the renting of individual rooms that is illegal.

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.

How it works is the county or muni specifies the number. This is similar to allocating land for single family or multi tenant. You can of course bypass this and rent rooms or have a group house, but renters may not have the same legal protections.

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.

I think back in the day when people would take on boarders (you see this in a lot of old movies, tv series, etc) it was also much easier to evict.

During college, myself and friends did the math and found buying a crappy house 20 miles away was vastly cheaper than renting so we did that.

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.'

Insane to be able to buy a house in college - I could barely afford rent in a crappy shared flat

mortgage payments are often cheaper than rent payments

The monthly mortgage payment on a house in many rural areas in the US is far less than shared rent in dense cities.

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.

If this was pre 2008 you could get a mortgage if you could fog a mirror.

I could've bought a house for $20k a few miles from my school. Rust belt.

Yep this place was around $60k for a big three story victorian in a crappy little town (former rail road hub between Indianapolis in Chicago). 4 big bedrooms, 2 small ones and 3 bathrooms.

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.

How did you qualify for a mortgage without income?

A lot of people have forgotten that between like 2004-2007 you could get a mortgage if you had a pulse.

They made sure to pull that ladder up real good after 08 though.

The problem wasn't sketchy mortgages, it was the borderline fraudulent financial shenanigans after that.

> 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

It was 1991 and we pooled money from 10 people. The house was super cheap ($60k) and in a very depressed area (Attica, Indiana). The seller was a person and not a bank.

Ah thanks. So the mortgage was quite small, still, hard to get one without income. Pooled ownership also makes it much more complicated.

I was the 'owner' of record. The others held rights to the house by agreement with me but all the responsibilities were mine.

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.

I vaguely remember a group of friends in college, at one point they were notified by the town that their shared house technically qualified as a brothel; some compromises were made, I think something like putting up more room dividers or something, that satisfied the powers that be

That's so funny because it would seem that dividers would assist in the supposed disallowed use here...

> I vaguely remember a group of friends in college, at one point they were notified by the town that their shared house technically qualified as a brothel;

From what I hear, 2025 college kids aren't have anywhere near enough sex to be classified as such.

College living in not comparable to SROs, in part because college kids are privileged, in part because college towns abide, and primarily because they are transient. A tenement full of grown men in SROs is an entirely different beast.

Yes, it is much more directly effective in housing people who would otherwise be homeless.

Wow. I went to college in Utah and had 5 roommates. A total of two rooms. It was a blast.

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