8 ms·

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 h

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!
orochimaaru 1y ago
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.
- visarga 1y ago
  > 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."
- bpt3 1y ago
  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.
itake 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  > 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.
  - Taek 1y ago
    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.
throw0101d 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? A private bedroom but shared living/cooking space is generally called a rooming/boarding house: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house * https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/multi-tenant-rooming-houses/ 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.
- mattkrause 1y ago
  My impression is that boarding house usually includes some services (cleaning, maintenance, food) from the owner or an employee who lives on the premises.
  - joelwilliamson 1y ago
    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.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      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.
hiatus 1y ago
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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
_fat_santa 1y ago
> 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.
drdec 1y ago
> 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.
yonran 1y ago
> 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/sf_planning/0-0-0-49051 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/sf_planning/0-0-0-49111 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).
- olalonde 1y ago
  Meanwhile, people build tiny homes to "solve homelessness"... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yJsWjulAonc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yJsWjulAonc
  - smegma2 1y ago
    Why the scare quotes? What else is supposed to be done when every other remedy is either illegal or too expensive!
- rexarex 1y ago
  Typically it’s two per bedroom plus one. The max occupancy is set on the lease.
fortran77 1y ago
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.
FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
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.'
- portaouflop 1y ago
  Insane to be able to buy a house in college - I could barely afford rent in a crappy shared flat
  - spogbiper 1y ago
    mortgage payments are often cheaper than rent payments
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    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.
  - kyleblarson 1y ago
    If this was pre 2008 you could get a mortgage if you could fog a mirror.
  - coryrc 1y ago
    I could've bought a house for $20k a few miles from my school. Rust belt.
    - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
caycep 1y ago
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
- epistasis 1y ago
  That's so funny because it would seem that dividers would assist in the supposed disallowed use here...
- koolba 1y ago
  > 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.
jaredklewis 1y ago
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).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- alistairSH 1y ago
  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.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    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.
Hilift 1y ago
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.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> 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-reform-targets-limits-on-unrelated-housemates/article_ac52da5a-ce82-4d94-8d5c-71f88e5b64a2.html 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.)
sandworm101 1y ago
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.
standardUser 1y ago
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.
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
  Yes, it is much more directly effective in housing people who would otherwise be homeless.

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!

orochimaaru 1y ago

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.

visarga 1y ago
> 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."
bpt3 1y ago
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.

itake 1y ago

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.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
AlexandrB 1y ago
> 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.
- Taek 1y ago
  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.

throw0101d 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? A private bedroom but shared living/cooking space is generally called a rooming/boarding house: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house * https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/multi-tenant-rooming-houses/ 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.

mattkrause 1y ago
My impression is that boarding house usually includes some services (cleaning, maintenance, food) from the owner or an employee who lives on the premises.
- joelwilliamson 1y ago
  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.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    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.

hiatus 1y ago

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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

_fat_santa 1y ago

> 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.

drdec 1y ago

> 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.

yonran 1y ago

> 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/sf_planning/0-0-0-49051 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/sf_planning/0-0-0-49111 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).

olalonde 1y ago
Meanwhile, people build tiny homes to "solve homelessness"... https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yJsWjulAonc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yJsWjulAonc
- smegma2 1y ago
  Why the scare quotes? What else is supposed to be done when every other remedy is either illegal or too expensive!
rexarex 1y ago
Typically it’s two per bedroom plus one. The max occupancy is set on the lease.

fortran77 1y ago

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.

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago

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.'

portaouflop 1y ago
Insane to be able to buy a house in college - I could barely afford rent in a crappy shared flat
- spogbiper 1y ago
  mortgage payments are often cheaper than rent payments
- zdragnar 1y ago
  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.
- kyleblarson 1y ago
  If this was pre 2008 you could get a mortgage if you could fog a mirror.
- coryrc 1y ago
  I could've bought a house for $20k a few miles from my school. Rust belt.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago

caycep 1y ago

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

epistasis 1y ago
That's so funny because it would seem that dividers would assist in the supposed disallowed use here...
koolba 1y ago
> 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.

jaredklewis 1y ago

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).

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
alistairSH 1y ago
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.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  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.

Hilift 1y ago

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.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> 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-reform-targets-limits-on-unrelated-housemates/article_ac52da5a-ce82-4d94-8d5c-71f88e5b64a2.html 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.)

sandworm101 1y ago

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.

standardUser 1y ago

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.

lazyasciiart 1y ago
Yes, it is much more directly effective in housing people who would otherwise be homeless.