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Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

311 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

bell-cot 1y ago
Zoning rules are awesome tools, for improving your own situation at the uncompensated expense of others. And what decent person would ever want to object, if 95% of the victims are both "not like us", and members of lower classes?
- profsummergig 1y ago
  2nd order effects. 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).
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    One moment you allow growing food in your front yard. 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.
    - plasticchris 1y ago
      Everyone has a different peeve, and they all conflict. That’s why population density correlates with regulation.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        regulation itself is fine. However the details matter and all too often the regulation is in the wrong place. Writing good regulations is hard. There are always unintended concequences, and most are not even willing to ask what they might be much less debate if we can/should accept them.
        bombcar 1y ago
        That's the real underlying current in all this - most people just don't give a shit one way or the other, so nothing much is going to move. 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard. 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?
  - wat10000 1y ago
    The absolute horror of people using their private property the way they wish without doing you any harm.
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    > Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard. So? Not your yard, not your business.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    Aesthetics matter. You grow food in the front yards, pretty soon front yards will look like shit, then the homes look like shit, and then your life feels like shit.
    - erfgerfgwertg 1y ago
      I think you hate dogs! Front yards were always a dog toilets, and were always full of shit!
    - wat10000 1y ago
      Every time I see a farm I think, this is so ugly, it would be so much nicer to look at if it were a suburb with manicured laws instead.
  - bell-cot 1y ago
    Straw man. You could easily use fire codes, noise ordinances, and other basic measures to rule out the real problems.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >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. Is it on their property? If so not my problem. Having principals and sticking to them makes reasoning about the subjects so easy.
- boringg 1y ago
  Or alternatively trying to not have an area run rampant with too many people living in a house causing fire risks. Or god forbid trying to plan a city for density, resources, school locations. Come on - zoning rules aren't some tool of repression. Sometimes they can be, but that isn't their raison d'etre.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    If your housing pressure is so significant, or your poverty so extensive, that people are willing to live in unsafe, overcrowded situations, then trying to regulate that away is not very likely to improve things, but just push people into other negative situations, like illegal lets where they have little recourse to complain about problems without the risk of losing their home.
    - boringg 1y ago
      One example - and very a extreme one to prove a point and not a very compelling one at that.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        It wasn't remotely compelling to me, given the very obvious issue with it. Are you going to enlighten us about the other examples that are not affected by the same counter-argument?
- echelon 1y ago
  Zoning rules can be useful, but if they produce negative externalities then they should be taxed. 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - 9rx 1y ago
    If the majority faction of the population want to force single family residences, what other majority faction is going to want to force a tax on it? Mathematically, you would need to find overlap where a large segment of the population want both single-family residences and to be taxed on it. Good luck.
    - echelon 1y ago
      You won't in the suburbs, which isn't where the problems lie. Nobody cares if you have a big single family residence when the land is plentiful. 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.
      - 9rx 1y ago
        > enough renters to form a voting bloc 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.
      - 1y ago
blargthorwars 1y ago
Rather than just lambast the people in the past for being stupid, it's often wise to think on why they did what they did. 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  ... and those people living on the street is better than them living under a roof?
- triceratops 1y ago
  > the article contains the reason: "as SROs disappeared, ... homelessness exploded nationwide." You're saying SROs were banned specifically to increase homelessness? Is this a discarded Bond movie plot?
  - wat10000 1y ago
    People don't specifically aim to increase homelessness, but people do often attempt to make "those people" go elsewhere, and whether that "elsewhere" involves a permanent structure is often not a concern.
    - triceratops 1y ago
      Well sure but the person I responded to put the two together and implied that was the motive.
- mnw21cam 1y ago
  I'm a scientist and a scholar, and I am right now living in a HMO with some lovely/interesting/weird housemates while I sort out my horrific divorce and fight through the courts to get my house that I own back. For legal reasons, I have had to pay all the normal bills for my house while my spouse has enjoyed the benefits of that. My salary can't stretch to running two separate full households, and so my temporary accommodation has been the cheapest respectable arrangement available. 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).
cjs_ac 1y ago
In the UK, these are called Houses in Multiple Occupation. They are regulated, licensed and inspected to ensure that they're not dangerous. https://www.gov.uk/renting-out-a-property/houses-in-multiple-occupation-hmo https://www.gov.uk/renting-out-a-property/houses-in-multiple...
- mnw21cam 1y ago
  Moreover, we have tax breaks encouraging a home owner to rent out a spare room or two. (Though if the home owner is living in the house, the renter's rights are much less and there isn't the same level of regulation as if the owner is remote.)
- rwmj 1y ago
  The other responses to this post are very strange. Here in the UK I too lived in HMOs for many years while I was a student at university and later when I started working. It is simply a normal way of living if you're in your twenties. At no point did I live in a house that was a fire risk / 5 to a room / had anyone who had "checked out". It also let me live cheaply and save a lot of money, and I met many life-long friends.
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    When I was a student I had in fact lived in a room with 5 other people while doing a summer internship. This was in Palo Alto. Basically all people living there were interns. There was even a choice of male-only, female-only or mixed rooms. It wasn't bad. People knowingly chose this kind of arrangement, sacrificing their privacy in exchange for more social mingling, just like youth hostels. In my 20s I would be upset if coming back from work I stayed alone in a private room in a new city; living with people my age was better.
- matt-p 1y ago
  Well, TIL that 3-4 sharing is a HMO, but doesn't require a licence. That makes no sense..
  - 1y ago
Workaccount2 1y ago
While these are great on paper, I think the part that needs solving is how to stop them from becoming dens of people who have checked out (voluntarily or not) of life/society. Getting a place to live in for $350/mo would be absolutely game changing for low income (and even middle income) people trying to build wealth. The downside though is that these places will invariably turn into social crack houses, rather than the sunny smilely communal life ideals they are sold as.
- rjdj377dhabsn 1y ago
  Do we really want the government to dictate how people live their lives? If someone wants to waste his life away, sitting around doing drugs, that should be up to him.
  - slt2021 1y ago
    [dead]
- red_rech 1y ago
  > The downside though is that these places will invariably turn into social crack houses, rather than the sunny smilely communal life ideals they are sold as. Ok, get rid of them, now the streets are social crack houses? What are we to do now? Perhaps the woodchipper?
  - reactordev 1y ago
    The Purge
  - gryfft 1y ago
    You certainly don't want yucky undesirables to have shelter when homeless, to be fed when hungry, to be clothed when naked? Just because they happen to be the same species as you? Just because their blood is the same color as yours? Just because that's the moral teaching of every dominant religious system? No, some people should be homeless, and suffer, and be made to bear humiliation. It is self evident that the suffering of the marginalized is a social good which the people must not be deprived of.
MangoToupe 1y ago
If only we took homelessness as seriously as we took the fear of how people live under a roof....
erfgerfgwertg 1y ago
[flagged]
- nwatson 1y ago
  Just wait for the City Office of Roommate-By-Another-Name Licensure.
  - erfgerfgwertg 1y ago
    just say they were robbers or squaters who broke in. City will immidiately drop all charges....!!!
deleted 1y ago
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xphos 1y ago
I find the comments on the site that it would have no economic demand laughable. Everything has demand the question is at what cost. If an SRO could cost 500$ a month in NYC people would jump on it. 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
- imgabe 1y ago
  > people living in them should just try not being to poor to have real housing 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”.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Most homeless have "mental issues". On a good day they will try, but they have bad days often enough. Sometimes mental issues are caused by 'hard drug' use, but there are plenty of other causes. Society has not found a good answer to these people (many of the things tried have been worse than living on the streets - despite a few freezing to death) 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.
    - xphos 1y ago
762236 1y ago
The advent of contraception also changed the game. Now people would expect to have sleep overs, sharing limited resources such as the bathroom, where that was less of an issue in the past.
- weakfish 1y ago
  I’m not sure I follow the train of thought here, can you rephrase?
- erfgerfgwertg 1y ago
  Not really, instead of 5 kids, they will get 5 dogs. The only difference is dogs shit outside, they still get private bathrooms!
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
Where are these types of places illegal in reality? 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.
- TuringNYC 1y ago
  >> Where are these types of places illegal in reality? 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.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Living in a car or being homeless is also super-dangerous when contrasted to living in a more typical housing arrangement. 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…)
    - mothballed 1y ago
      Rational people tend to get the safest housing they can afford. 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.
      - TuringNYC 1y ago
        Totally agree on all this points. The real issue is insufficient supply of housing. All these problems would go away if housing stock kept up with population. The interim regulation is addressing risks of the outcomes of poor policy, rather than addressing the poor policy in the first place.
alistairSH 1y ago
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-occupancymultiple-dwelling 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).
- swsieber 1y ago
  Wow. I went to college in Utah and had 5 roommates. A total of two rooms. It was a blast.
- avemg 1y ago
  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!
duped 1y ago
This reminds me of places where it's illegal for more than N~=3 women to share a residence, ostensibly to prevent sex work (the assumption being that any home with a significant number of unmarried women is a brothel). 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).
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  the cool thing about that is nobody can cite a single source 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
  - bombcar 1y ago
    My urban legend version had something about how their periods would all get in sync and then it would overthrow the government. Fun how college bullshit becomes well-known fact over time.
pavon 1y ago
Interesting, I knew SROs were not allowed in most places in the US, but never clumped roommates in with that. All the places I've lived I had no problem sharing apartments let alone houses with roommates. I wonder if the laws distinguish from roommates chosen by tenants, vs multiple tenants chosen by the landlord, or if the places I've lived allowed SROs, or if the law was just commonly ignored.
- pavon 1y ago
  To answer my own question. No state prohibits subletting. Maine law gives renters the right to sublet, New York limits the reasons landlords can refuse subletting, and all other states leave it up to the landlord (with differences in details, such as the default if the lease doesn't explicitly prohibit or allow it). 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.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    I wonder how they define "related". 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?
noisebuffer 1y ago
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duxup 1y ago
I would imagine this is more about subletting? 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.
dkarl 1y ago
For a few weeks I was looking to rent a bedroom to use as an office, because my wife works at home and takes a lot of in-person meetings in our house, and also to help with work-life separation. I reached out to a few people who were advertising for roommates, proposing to pay significantly less in rent, with limits on the hours I could access the space and how I could use it (no sleeping over, no cooking in the kitchen, etc.) The people I talked to were very surprised at my proposition and clearly hadn't heard anything like it before. They said it sounded interesting, but they needed the full amount they were listing for. 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?
- nradov 1y ago
  No, that type of arrangement isn't common. Very few people want to rent a bedroom as a business office. And most renters looking to sublease a room do so because they need the cash: paying them less doesn't solve their problem.
- paulcole 1y ago
  > 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.
  - zachkatz 1y ago
    There are tons of roommate situations in Portland for around that price: https://portland.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=700#search=2~grid~27 https://portland.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=700#sea...
    - paulcole 1y ago
      Around doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Many fewer available at $600! I also think you're ignoring that you're going to be contributing to utilities in many of those share situations. I think the WeWork price now is $599 last I checked.
Traster 1y ago
I don't like this line of reasoning because it's largely just crystalizing a loss. We have this in the UK - houses of multiple occupancy. It's a great idea where you take a home that in the 1980s would house a family and split it into 5 flats where each person can rent 10-20 square metres each. I would much rather someone did something to address the fact that the average family in the UK can afford roughly 1/5th the amount of housing they could in the 1980s. And of course, because of this arbitrage now a family that wants to live in that home is competing with the rental income of 5+ tenants in a HMO. 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.
- nradov 1y ago
  The UK has also had extremely high immigration rates since the 1980s. Whether that's good or bad policy isn't my place to say, but it certainly places extreme pressure on the housing market. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/ https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
  - philipwhiuk 1y ago
    > Whether that's good or bad policy isn't my place to say 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.
    - nradov 1y ago
      Assume positive intent. I flagged your comment because you made a false and scurrilous insinuation about my intentions. I'm not a UK citizen or resident and don't care about their immigration policy one way or another. But a high immigration rate will obviously increase housing demand: this is basic macroeconomics and trivially true. 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.
cs702 1y ago
Interesting. The Pew Research linked to by the OP has a lot more detail: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2025/07/how-states-and-cities-decimated-americans-lowest-cost-housing-option 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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
xnx 1y ago
Laws like this are designed to keep undesirables out. Rich folks don't want 18 people living in a single house and attending schools in their district.
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  Mandatory low density zoning in general serves that purpose, yes. 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).
- dgs_sgd 1y ago
  I think that statement is true for a lot of middle class people too.
- 15155 1y ago
  Is there potentially an overlap between the kind of individuals that might want to live in a house with 18 other people and general criminality?
calvinmorrison 1y ago
the lack of flop houses and boarding houses is literally why people are homeless
warmwaffles 1y ago
I've heard these referred to as "Brothel Laws".
_alternator_ 1y ago
The link is basically a comment thread for a report by Pew: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2025/07/how-states-and-cities-decimated-americans-lowest-cost-housing-option https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...
gosub100 1y ago
How do you serve a warrant in a house with 12 unrelated people? How much easier is it to commit rape, petty theft? How much more communicable disease such has Hep-B is spread with N people sharing a bathroom? How much more likely is a house fire? How much more likely is domestic violence due to conflicts over the kitchen or utilities? I think these laws are built with at least some creedence.
- visarga 1y ago
  The article is about SROs not houses with 12 people.
  - gosub100 1y ago
    Ok so we agree there is a valid reason to limit the total number of people who live in a single residence?
- haroldp 1y ago
  Now ask the same questions about homeless people living in tents down by the river.
  - gosub100 1y ago
    That's a false equivalency; there is no imperative that laws must be broken to minimize homelessness. 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.
advisedwang 1y ago
The author did not even talk about why these laws are in place, so I think it's worth mentioning that these laws are there to prevent slums. I'm not saying there's no place for them, but "busybodies and do-gooders who prevent people from using their own property" is extremely dismissive of efforts to solve a huge problem that existed in the 19th and 20th centuries. In fact, it sounds like the author would argue that being a slumlord is the right of property owners.
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  You can prevent slums without outlawing this type of housing, they just need to be actively managed. Require landlords via regulation to keep up maintenance and evict unruly tenants, and actually enforce those laws.
- visarga 1y ago
  I think you just push the problem away, now you got homeless people.
rsynnott 1y ago
> Perhaps the simplest method of creating low-cost shared housing is to allow unrelated individuals to share a house in the same way that relatives are allowed to share a house ... Huh, it never even really occurred to me that anywhere banned this.
physicsguy 1y ago
We have this system in the U.K. largely and it hasn’t really fixed the problem, because now even these house shares are incredibly expensive. In London you can be looking at well over £1000 per month for a bedroom and access to a shared kitchen and bathroom. Licensing is required for what are here called HMOs (houses in multiple occupation) to make sure that properties are safe. But increasing the remit of licensing has meant people selling up the rental properties too because the market isn’t bearing the additional cost of complying. 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.
- s0rce 1y ago
  I dont think we have restrictions here (SF Bay area) and a room in a shared apt/house is in many areas even more expensive ($1500-2000).
  - b112 1y ago
    The most expensive real estate on the planet is in the bay area, and as with any dense urban area, it's all about what the market will support. Forced open bidding would make one big difference in pricing. But those high salaries just make everything more expensive.
  - lazyasciiart 1y ago
    There’s pretty significant restrictions in most of the Bay Area. But even without restrictions, for decades the SF board of supervisors was actively demolishing SROs and trying to make housing more expensive so they had a better class of residents. https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/ https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/
- loeg 1y ago
  You can't make this kind of conclusion. You haven't refuted the counterfactual -- homelessness would be higher without those measures in the UK. No one who thinks we should legalize roommates and SROs is opposed to building more housing / densification; they're complementary.
ashoeafoot 1y ago
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Aardwolf 1y ago
> demanding every room have a private bathroom Does this mean in the US apartments have as many bathrooms as bedrooms?
- bombcar 1y ago
  No, but many will have it accidentally. 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.
xnx 1y ago
This is a prime example of what advocates mean when they say "decriminalize housing".
jojomodding 1y ago
This seems insane. Living in shared flats is very common in Germany presumably most of Europe. (I'm not talking about boarding houses.) It's not unheard of for them to include eight otherwise unrelated people (as long as there's enough space for everyone). Living in such a shared flat is basically the norm for college students and a formative experience for most. It's kinda shocking that this is illegal in some countries otherwise considered "free." Why can I not live together with my friends?
- mothballed 1y ago
  Because the property-owning voter block are experts at inventing contrived reasons that they pretend to care for the safety of tenants, by implementing policies that drive up rent and property prices by regulating housing into more scarcity. A good way to do this is to start screaming about fires as soon as you start packing more people in, no matter that it comes at the expense of tenants being less to afford medicine, good food, education, childcare and other necessities.
  - supertrope 1y ago
    Mass casualty events get a disproportionate amount of attention. Like the 2016 Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.
- bahmboo 1y ago
  It’s the same in the US in college towns. Many people live in shared housing as you describe. My kids and my nieces and nephews have all done it. But I do recognize the point of the article.
- wil421 1y ago
  This is not illegal. I with 3-4 unrelated people in college from time to time. There was one group that rented a massive house and had 15-20 people living in it.
  - xvedejas 1y ago
    I've definitely done it in places (in the US) where locally it was not legal. But it's not like the cops ever checked and caused us trouble about it, so it's easy to get away with it if there aren't other legal issues going on.
jjice 1y ago
I have a friend up in the Medford Summerville area north of Boston and lots of homes around there have "brothel laws" where unrelated people are capped in a home, seemingly dating back to hundreds of years ago. I think this was the case in Charleston SC as well. I assume these laws have stayed for other reasons.
stego-tech 1y ago
This has been a continued bugbear on my housing hunt for years, now. So many townhomes, condos, townships, and communities arbitrarily limiting who I can share my space with, even as a full-time owner-occupant of that space. It’s particularly brutal for the LGBTQ+ community because so many of us find our happiness in “found families” which often aren’t related by blood or marriage and thus can be evicted or fined by an HOA or condo board. 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.
- lazide 1y ago
  Hmm, can you give some locations? At least in CA, I saw limits on max number of adults, but never any specification of the relationships of the adults. That was a pretty liberal area though. 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.
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    This is in MA. Several townships still have laws on the books about occupant relations and limits, and all but one condo complex I’ve looked at units in had language in their covenants about occupant relations. Realtors countered that these sections aren’t actively enforced anymore, or that the Supreme Judicial Court issued a ruling saying they’re null and void, and that was sometimes (but not always) true. Even so, their existence alone creates the potential for lawfare that a new homeowner just cannot afford, and so we had to pass on them due to that risk assessment. 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.
jedberg 1y ago
Edit: I was wrong, this was just made up by college kids. See comment below. 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.
- silviogutierrez 1y ago
  Ackchyually… I think this is apocryphal. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brothel-laws-sororities/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brothel-laws-sororities/
  - jedberg 1y ago
    Oh man, you're totally right! I never even considered that it was just a college rumor.
AfterHIA 1y ago
In coming to terms with the real estate crisis we're getting here in Utah it seems that the biggest issue is the zoning laws which prevent outright or deincentivize developers from producing anything other than multi-family apartments, new hotels, and swaths of single family homes. It's killing our state's psychogeography and Brandon Fugal is profiting widely from this. If we had the political will to create new legislation we could literally be building the communities of the future. Right now we're taking ever open field or piece of undeveloped land and turning into retail pads. It's absolutely sinister. https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/brandon-fugal https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/brandon-fugal https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/alexis-osmond https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/alexis-osmond https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades_Project.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_...

311 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

Zoning rules are awesome tools, for improving your own situation at the uncompensated expense of others. And what decent person would ever want to object, if 95% of the victims are both "not like us", and members of lower classes?

profsummergig 1y ago
2nd order effects. 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).
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  One moment you allow growing food in your front yard. 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.
  - plasticchris 1y ago
    Everyone has a different peeve, and they all conflict. That’s why population density correlates with regulation.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      regulation itself is fine. However the details matter and all too often the regulation is in the wrong place. Writing good regulations is hard. There are always unintended concequences, and most are not even willing to ask what they might be much less debate if we can/should accept them.
      - bombcar 1y ago
        That's the real underlying current in all this - most people just don't give a shit one way or the other, so nothing much is going to move. 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- 9rx 1y ago
  > Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard. 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?
- wat10000 1y ago
  The absolute horror of people using their private property the way they wish without doing you any harm.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  > Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard. So? Not your yard, not your business.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Aesthetics matter. You grow food in the front yards, pretty soon front yards will look like shit, then the homes look like shit, and then your life feels like shit.
  - erfgerfgwertg 1y ago
    I think you hate dogs! Front yards were always a dog toilets, and were always full of shit!
  - wat10000 1y ago
    Every time I see a farm I think, this is so ugly, it would be so much nicer to look at if it were a suburb with manicured laws instead.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  Straw man. You could easily use fire codes, noise ordinances, and other basic measures to rule out the real problems.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >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. Is it on their property? If so not my problem. Having principals and sticking to them makes reasoning about the subjects so easy.
boringg 1y ago
Or alternatively trying to not have an area run rampant with too many people living in a house causing fire risks. Or god forbid trying to plan a city for density, resources, school locations. Come on - zoning rules aren't some tool of repression. Sometimes they can be, but that isn't their raison d'etre.
- vidarh 1y ago
  If your housing pressure is so significant, or your poverty so extensive, that people are willing to live in unsafe, overcrowded situations, then trying to regulate that away is not very likely to improve things, but just push people into other negative situations, like illegal lets where they have little recourse to complain about problems without the risk of losing their home.
  - boringg 1y ago
    One example - and very a extreme one to prove a point and not a very compelling one at that.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      It wasn't remotely compelling to me, given the very obvious issue with it. Are you going to enlighten us about the other examples that are not affected by the same counter-argument?
echelon 1y ago
Zoning rules can be useful, but if they produce negative externalities then they should be taxed. 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- 9rx 1y ago
  If the majority faction of the population want to force single family residences, what other majority faction is going to want to force a tax on it? Mathematically, you would need to find overlap where a large segment of the population want both single-family residences and to be taxed on it. Good luck.
  - echelon 1y ago
    You won't in the suburbs, which isn't where the problems lie. Nobody cares if you have a big single family residence when the land is plentiful. 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.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      > enough renters to form a voting bloc 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.
    - 1y ago

blargthorwars 1y ago

Rather than just lambast the people in the past for being stupid, it's often wise to think on why they did what they did. 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.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 1y ago
... and those people living on the street is better than them living under a roof?
triceratops 1y ago
> the article contains the reason: "as SROs disappeared, ... homelessness exploded nationwide." You're saying SROs were banned specifically to increase homelessness? Is this a discarded Bond movie plot?
- wat10000 1y ago
  People don't specifically aim to increase homelessness, but people do often attempt to make "those people" go elsewhere, and whether that "elsewhere" involves a permanent structure is often not a concern.
  - triceratops 1y ago
    Well sure but the person I responded to put the two together and implied that was the motive.
mnw21cam 1y ago
I'm a scientist and a scholar, and I am right now living in a HMO with some lovely/interesting/weird housemates while I sort out my horrific divorce and fight through the courts to get my house that I own back. For legal reasons, I have had to pay all the normal bills for my house while my spouse has enjoyed the benefits of that. My salary can't stretch to running two separate full households, and so my temporary accommodation has been the cheapest respectable arrangement available. 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).

cjs_ac 1y ago

In the UK, these are called Houses in Multiple Occupation. They are regulated, licensed and inspected to ensure that they're not dangerous. https://www.gov.uk/renting-out-a-property/houses-in-multiple-occupation-hmo https://www.gov.uk/renting-out-a-property/houses-in-multiple...

mnw21cam 1y ago
Moreover, we have tax breaks encouraging a home owner to rent out a spare room or two. (Though if the home owner is living in the house, the renter's rights are much less and there isn't the same level of regulation as if the owner is remote.)
rwmj 1y ago
The other responses to this post are very strange. Here in the UK I too lived in HMOs for many years while I was a student at university and later when I started working. It is simply a normal way of living if you're in your twenties. At no point did I live in a house that was a fire risk / 5 to a room / had anyone who had "checked out". It also let me live cheaply and save a lot of money, and I met many life-long friends.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  When I was a student I had in fact lived in a room with 5 other people while doing a summer internship. This was in Palo Alto. Basically all people living there were interns. There was even a choice of male-only, female-only or mixed rooms. It wasn't bad. People knowingly chose this kind of arrangement, sacrificing their privacy in exchange for more social mingling, just like youth hostels. In my 20s I would be upset if coming back from work I stayed alone in a private room in a new city; living with people my age was better.
matt-p 1y ago
Well, TIL that 3-4 sharing is a HMO, but doesn't require a licence. That makes no sense..
- 1y ago

Workaccount2 1y ago

While these are great on paper, I think the part that needs solving is how to stop them from becoming dens of people who have checked out (voluntarily or not) of life/society. 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.

rjdj377dhabsn 1y ago
Do we really want the government to dictate how people live their lives? If someone wants to waste his life away, sitting around doing drugs, that should be up to him.
- slt2021 1y ago
  [dead]
red_rech 1y ago
> 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. Ok, get rid of them, now the streets are social crack houses? What are we to do now? Perhaps the woodchipper?
- reactordev 1y ago
  The Purge
- gryfft 1y ago
  You certainly don't want yucky undesirables to have shelter when homeless, to be fed when hungry, to be clothed when naked? Just because they happen to be the same species as you? Just because their blood is the same color as yours? Just because that's the moral teaching of every dominant religious system? No, some people should be homeless, and suffer, and be made to bear humiliation. It is self evident that the suffering of the marginalized is a social good which the people must not be deprived of.

MangoToupe 1y ago

If only we took homelessness as seriously as we took the fear of how people live under a roof....

erfgerfgwertg 1y ago

[flagged]

nwatson 1y ago
Just wait for the City Office of Roommate-By-Another-Name Licensure.
- erfgerfgwertg 1y ago
  just say they were robbers or squaters who broke in. City will immidiately drop all charges....!!!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

xphos 1y ago

I find the comments on the site that it would have no economic demand laughable. Everything has demand the question is at what cost. If an SRO could cost 500$ a month in NYC people would jump on it. 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

imgabe 1y ago
> people living in them should just try not being to poor to have real housing 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”.
- bluGill 1y ago
  Most homeless have "mental issues". On a good day they will try, but they have bad days often enough. Sometimes mental issues are caused by 'hard drug' use, but there are plenty of other causes. Society has not found a good answer to these people (many of the things tried have been worse than living on the streets - despite a few freezing to death) 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.
  - xphos 1y ago

762236 1y ago

The advent of contraception also changed the game. Now people would expect to have sleep overs, sharing limited resources such as the bathroom, where that was less of an issue in the past.

weakfish 1y ago
I’m not sure I follow the train of thought here, can you rephrase?
erfgerfgwertg 1y ago
Not really, instead of 5 kids, they will get 5 dogs. The only difference is dogs shit outside, they still get private bathrooms!

AnotherGoodName 1y ago

Where are these types of places illegal in reality? 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.

TuringNYC 1y ago
>> Where are these types of places illegal in reality? 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.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  Living in a car or being homeless is also super-dangerous when contrasted to living in a more typical housing arrangement. 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…)
  - mothballed 1y ago
    Rational people tend to get the safest housing they can afford. 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.
    - TuringNYC 1y ago
      Totally agree on all this points. The real issue is insufficient supply of housing. All these problems would go away if housing stock kept up with population. The interim regulation is addressing risks of the outcomes of poor policy, rather than addressing the poor policy in the first place.

alistairSH 1y ago

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-occupancymultiple-dwelling 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).

swsieber 1y ago
Wow. I went to college in Utah and had 5 roommates. A total of two rooms. It was a blast.
avemg 1y ago
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!

duped 1y ago

This reminds me of places where it's illegal for more than N~=3 women to share a residence, ostensibly to prevent sex work (the assumption being that any home with a significant number of unmarried women is a brothel). 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).

yieldcrv 1y ago
the cool thing about that is nobody can cite a single source 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
- bombcar 1y ago
  My urban legend version had something about how their periods would all get in sync and then it would overthrow the government. Fun how college bullshit becomes well-known fact over time.

pavon 1y ago

Interesting, I knew SROs were not allowed in most places in the US, but never clumped roommates in with that. All the places I've lived I had no problem sharing apartments let alone houses with roommates. I wonder if the laws distinguish from roommates chosen by tenants, vs multiple tenants chosen by the landlord, or if the places I've lived allowed SROs, or if the law was just commonly ignored.

pavon 1y ago
To answer my own question. No state prohibits subletting. Maine law gives renters the right to sublet, New York limits the reasons landlords can refuse subletting, and all other states leave it up to the landlord (with differences in details, such as the default if the lease doesn't explicitly prohibit or allow it). 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.
- bombcar 1y ago
  I wonder how they define "related". 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?

noisebuffer 1y ago

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duxup 1y ago

I would imagine this is more about subletting? 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.

dkarl 1y ago

For a few weeks I was looking to rent a bedroom to use as an office, because my wife works at home and takes a lot of in-person meetings in our house, and also to help with work-life separation. I reached out to a few people who were advertising for roommates, proposing to pay significantly less in rent, with limits on the hours I could access the space and how I could use it (no sleeping over, no cooking in the kitchen, etc.) The people I talked to were very surprised at my proposition and clearly hadn't heard anything like it before. They said it sounded interesting, but they needed the full amount they were listing for. 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?

nradov 1y ago
No, that type of arrangement isn't common. Very few people want to rent a bedroom as a business office. And most renters looking to sublease a room do so because they need the cash: paying them less doesn't solve their problem.
paulcole 1y ago
> 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.
- zachkatz 1y ago
  There are tons of roommate situations in Portland for around that price: https://portland.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=700#search=2~grid~27 https://portland.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=700#sea...
  - paulcole 1y ago
    Around doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Many fewer available at $600! I also think you're ignoring that you're going to be contributing to utilities in many of those share situations. I think the WeWork price now is $599 last I checked.

Traster 1y ago

I don't like this line of reasoning because it's largely just crystalizing a loss. We have this in the UK - houses of multiple occupancy. It's a great idea where you take a home that in the 1980s would house a family and split it into 5 flats where each person can rent 10-20 square metres each. I would much rather someone did something to address the fact that the average family in the UK can afford roughly 1/5th the amount of housing they could in the 1980s. And of course, because of this arbitrage now a family that wants to live in that home is competing with the rental income of 5+ tenants in a HMO. 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.

nradov 1y ago
The UK has also had extremely high immigration rates since the 1980s. Whether that's good or bad policy isn't my place to say, but it certainly places extreme pressure on the housing market. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/ https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  > Whether that's good or bad policy isn't my place to say 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.
  - nradov 1y ago
    Assume positive intent. I flagged your comment because you made a false and scurrilous insinuation about my intentions. I'm not a UK citizen or resident and don't care about their immigration policy one way or another. But a high immigration rate will obviously increase housing demand: this is basic macroeconomics and trivially true. 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.

cs702 1y ago

Interesting. The Pew Research linked to by the OP has a lot more detail: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2025/07/how-states-and-cities-decimated-americans-lowest-cost-housing-option 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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

xnx 1y ago

Laws like this are designed to keep undesirables out. Rich folks don't want 18 people living in a single house and attending schools in their district.

TulliusCicero 1y ago
Mandatory low density zoning in general serves that purpose, yes. 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).
dgs_sgd 1y ago
I think that statement is true for a lot of middle class people too.
15155 1y ago
Is there potentially an overlap between the kind of individuals that might want to live in a house with 18 other people and general criminality?

calvinmorrison 1y ago

the lack of flop houses and boarding houses is literally why people are homeless

warmwaffles 1y ago

I've heard these referred to as "Brothel Laws".

_alternator_ 1y ago

The link is basically a comment thread for a report by Pew: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2025/07/how-states-and-cities-decimated-americans-lowest-cost-housing-option https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...

gosub100 1y ago

How do you serve a warrant in a house with 12 unrelated people? How much easier is it to commit rape, petty theft? How much more communicable disease such has Hep-B is spread with N people sharing a bathroom? How much more likely is a house fire? How much more likely is domestic violence due to conflicts over the kitchen or utilities? I think these laws are built with at least some creedence.

visarga 1y ago
The article is about SROs not houses with 12 people.
- gosub100 1y ago
  Ok so we agree there is a valid reason to limit the total number of people who live in a single residence?
haroldp 1y ago
Now ask the same questions about homeless people living in tents down by the river.
- gosub100 1y ago
  That's a false equivalency; there is no imperative that laws must be broken to minimize homelessness. 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.

advisedwang 1y ago

The author did not even talk about why these laws are in place, so I think it's worth mentioning that these laws are there to prevent slums. I'm not saying there's no place for them, but "busybodies and do-gooders who prevent people from using their own property" is extremely dismissive of efforts to solve a huge problem that existed in the 19th and 20th centuries. In fact, it sounds like the author would argue that being a slumlord is the right of property owners.

TulliusCicero 1y ago
You can prevent slums without outlawing this type of housing, they just need to be actively managed. Require landlords via regulation to keep up maintenance and evict unruly tenants, and actually enforce those laws.
visarga 1y ago
I think you just push the problem away, now you got homeless people.

rsynnott 1y ago

> Perhaps the simplest method of creating low-cost shared housing is to allow unrelated individuals to share a house in the same way that relatives are allowed to share a house ... Huh, it never even really occurred to me that anywhere banned this.

physicsguy 1y ago

We have this system in the U.K. largely and it hasn’t really fixed the problem, because now even these house shares are incredibly expensive. In London you can be looking at well over £1000 per month for a bedroom and access to a shared kitchen and bathroom. Licensing is required for what are here called HMOs (houses in multiple occupation) to make sure that properties are safe. But increasing the remit of licensing has meant people selling up the rental properties too because the market isn’t bearing the additional cost of complying. 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.

s0rce 1y ago
I dont think we have restrictions here (SF Bay area) and a room in a shared apt/house is in many areas even more expensive ($1500-2000).
- b112 1y ago
  The most expensive real estate on the planet is in the bay area, and as with any dense urban area, it's all about what the market will support. Forced open bidding would make one big difference in pricing. But those high salaries just make everything more expensive.
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
  There’s pretty significant restrictions in most of the Bay Area. But even without restrictions, for decades the SF board of supervisors was actively demolishing SROs and trying to make housing more expensive so they had a better class of residents. https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/ https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/
loeg 1y ago
You can't make this kind of conclusion. You haven't refuted the counterfactual -- homelessness would be higher without those measures in the UK. No one who thinks we should legalize roommates and SROs is opposed to building more housing / densification; they're complementary.

ashoeafoot 1y ago

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Aardwolf 1y ago

> demanding every room have a private bathroom Does this mean in the US apartments have as many bathrooms as bedrooms?

bombcar 1y ago
No, but many will have it accidentally. 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.

xnx 1y ago

This is a prime example of what advocates mean when they say "decriminalize housing".

jojomodding 1y ago

This seems insane. Living in shared flats is very common in Germany presumably most of Europe. (I'm not talking about boarding houses.) It's not unheard of for them to include eight otherwise unrelated people (as long as there's enough space for everyone). Living in such a shared flat is basically the norm for college students and a formative experience for most. It's kinda shocking that this is illegal in some countries otherwise considered "free." Why can I not live together with my friends?

mothballed 1y ago
Because the property-owning voter block are experts at inventing contrived reasons that they pretend to care for the safety of tenants, by implementing policies that drive up rent and property prices by regulating housing into more scarcity. A good way to do this is to start screaming about fires as soon as you start packing more people in, no matter that it comes at the expense of tenants being less to afford medicine, good food, education, childcare and other necessities.
- supertrope 1y ago
  Mass casualty events get a disproportionate amount of attention. Like the 2016 Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.
bahmboo 1y ago
It’s the same in the US in college towns. Many people live in shared housing as you describe. My kids and my nieces and nephews have all done it. But I do recognize the point of the article.
wil421 1y ago
This is not illegal. I with 3-4 unrelated people in college from time to time. There was one group that rented a massive house and had 15-20 people living in it.
- xvedejas 1y ago
  I've definitely done it in places (in the US) where locally it was not legal. But it's not like the cops ever checked and caused us trouble about it, so it's easy to get away with it if there aren't other legal issues going on.

jjice 1y ago

I have a friend up in the Medford Summerville area north of Boston and lots of homes around there have "brothel laws" where unrelated people are capped in a home, seemingly dating back to hundreds of years ago. I think this was the case in Charleston SC as well. I assume these laws have stayed for other reasons.

stego-tech 1y ago

This has been a continued bugbear on my housing hunt for years, now. So many townhomes, condos, townships, and communities arbitrarily limiting who I can share my space with, even as a full-time owner-occupant of that space. It’s particularly brutal for the LGBTQ+ community because so many of us find our happiness in “found families” which often aren’t related by blood or marriage and thus can be evicted or fined by an HOA or condo board. 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.

lazide 1y ago
Hmm, can you give some locations? At least in CA, I saw limits on max number of adults, but never any specification of the relationships of the adults. That was a pretty liberal area though. 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.
- stego-tech 1y ago
  This is in MA. Several townships still have laws on the books about occupant relations and limits, and all but one condo complex I’ve looked at units in had language in their covenants about occupant relations. Realtors countered that these sections aren’t actively enforced anymore, or that the Supreme Judicial Court issued a ruling saying they’re null and void, and that was sometimes (but not always) true. Even so, their existence alone creates the potential for lawfare that a new homeowner just cannot afford, and so we had to pass on them due to that risk assessment. 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.

jedberg 1y ago

Edit: I was wrong, this was just made up by college kids. See comment below. 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.

silviogutierrez 1y ago
Ackchyually… I think this is apocryphal. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brothel-laws-sororities/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brothel-laws-sororities/
- jedberg 1y ago
  Oh man, you're totally right! I never even considered that it was just a college rumor.

AfterHIA 1y ago

In coming to terms with the real estate crisis we're getting here in Utah it seems that the biggest issue is the zoning laws which prevent outright or deincentivize developers from producing anything other than multi-family apartments, new hotels, and swaths of single family homes. It's killing our state's psychogeography and Brandon Fugal is profiting widely from this. If we had the political will to create new legislation we could literally be building the communities of the future. Right now we're taking ever open field or piece of undeveloped land and turning into retail pads. It's absolutely sinister. https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/brandon-fugal https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/brandon-fugal https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/alexis-osmond https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/alexis-osmond https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades_Project.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_...