Restrictions on House Sharing by Unrelated Roommates

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).

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.

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.

> 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?

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).

... and those people living on the street is better than them living under a roof?

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.

Well, TIL that 3-4 sharing is a HMO, but doesn't require a licence. That makes no sense..

> They are regulated, licensed and inspected to ensure that they're not dangerous.

ish.., to the level of attention councils can afford to do so in an era of tight local government finances, and in the backdrop of limited housing stock making it difficult to refuse planning permission.

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.)

> 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?

I have been sharing house with a roommate for years now (in Portugal), and I prefer it to living alone. Even with a girlfriend, I highly prefer to live in a house with more people.

I come from a "big" family, and I am used to movement where I live. And living alone or just with one person, makes my energy go down.

Now that I plan on moving to Paraguay, I am looking for co-living options or someone to rent place with. Different people have different preferred ways of living.

For me, it's cheaper, and I am happier, when I share place with other people. Also, you get to learn from others, have people to talk with, at the expense of a bit of privacy. But depending on the roommates you choose the privacy thing is usually not an issue.

I thought the entire goal was to get to a point where you're checked out? Retirement. The issue is income hasn't kept up with inflation and definitely not the rents required for older gen folks to survive on their own.

Perspective: My mother owned a home in a wealthy area of Virginia, her mortgage was $1200/mo for 30 years. When she sold it (for double what she paid for it) she thought she was rich. Then came the assisted living rent bill of $8k/mo. She realized she only has a few years to live on her life savings. It's a generational rug pull and kicking the ladder out from those climbing. It's going to end very badly.

I mean that just sounds like bollocks to me. I house shared for years and it was just perfect. If I was going to become a crack addict just because I got cheap accommodation I mean what chance have I got?

That "problem" seems to rest within you and not them. Ugly patternalism combined with classism and a view of work more appropriate to an aristocrat towards their serfs than an inhabitant of a free country.

hahahaha. A room in a house is going to cost you $1,800/month in San Francisco.

I think it's well and good to try to address that problem too, but it does seem like a different, although not entirely unrelated issue. What you're describing is already happening now, it's just happening in public spaces (transit stations, parks, etc) where it affects everyone.

Is it any better that somebody checks out within a SRO than a tent?

I have to imagine that at 10% of the rental market there had to be tons of drugs being done within SROs. But also that a lot of drugs were being done in the other 90% of the rental market ...

"Cheap rent sounds good on paper... but why would you work?"

My cousin helps run one of these as an intentional community for homeless people in New Orleans and it is not at all a social crack house.

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.

The Bay Area has lots of these places, running under the radar, which are not turning into anything bad, as they are occupied by young people working at startups.

> 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”.

Ecconomics always depends on the situation of the person in question. I want a 100 room mansion with my own pipe organ, and whatever other "scoopy-doo" things I can dream of. I want servants to take care of it. I want... I can't afford that, but I can afford a single family house so that is what I have.

Most people living with roommates don't want that situation (here I distiguish roomates from someone you have a romantic tie with), but it is the best compromise. Roommates save money which is important when you don't have enough (hint almost nobody has enough money - even billionairs sometimes have to not buy something they want because their budget can't afford it)

SRO would solve a lot of problems. There are some people that is the only living situation they could afford. There are some people who want to spend their money on other things and so the savings from SRO enables that other thing they want. Many of those latter will "settle down and get married" in a few years thus changing their life situation, that is okay, life is not static.

>if SROs with regulations could exist

Regulations are why they don't exist. Once you pile on everyone's additions to the bike shed it's an economic non starter.

We already have SROs, they're just informal subletting arrangements - aka "having roommates". SROs would legitimize what is already being done and fix a lot of problems with the arrangement being informal. i.e. how do you evict someone you're illegally subletting your apartment to without risking getting other people also evicted?

In terms of dignity, the scale goes, from less to more dignified:

1. Homelessness (at least, being on the street) 2. Informal subletting 3. SROs

Furthermore, dignity is not the only variable we need to consider. The rise in unsheltered homeless has resulted in a commensurate rise of hostile architecture - i.e. physical DRM to prevent homeless people from pirating the concept of shelter. This has measurably reduced the quality of public spaces, transit, and intercity travel. It would be better for society if we didn't do this.

I’m not sure I follow the train of thought here, can you rephrase?

Not really, instead of 5 kids, they will get 5 dogs.

The only difference is dogs shit outside, they still get private bathrooms!

>> 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.

I've seen them in posher suburban towns and a lot of HOAs. It's usually worded that no more than 2-4 non relatives can share a single residence. You won't find it in the more working class towns and cities. I have seen some Florida coastal towns, like the Keys, enable a maximum in order to push out the working poor who may be living 6-8 in a 2-bedroom house or apartment.

You aren't in the neighborhoods where this has been in place. But it doesn't mean its not happening.

In the Netherlands from what I've seen (at least around Amsterdam) it's almost always forbidden for houses to be rented out to a group of flatmates (e.g. students), some people go so far as to fake relationships to imply they're a couple instead.

I'm not sure if this an actual law but housing listings often imply its forbidden in the neighborhood, they're looking for couples and families with kids.

If it's illegal you're in a situation where the landlord likes money and the tenants like not being homeless. In a house where 4th amendment rights are strongest.

In practice I think it's about impossible to enforce. Code enforcement or police would need a warrant to enter, and in most jurisdictions the complaints are public record far enough ahead of time anyone with the slightest bit of foresight would get ahead of it.

In my county sometimes I monitor the local complaints, mostly initially when I was looking at properties because I did not want to live next to a neighbor who likes to be a busybody to the code enforcement. There are a number of properties that just lock their gates whenever a code complaints happen or tell code inspection to kick rocks, by the time they come back with a warrant the situation is faked well enough they can't do anything.

They’re (SROs) illegal in every major US city.

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.

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.

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!