The article doesn't make this clear... is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?
Immediately post-college, I shared houses with other 20-somethings. It was always a single lease - 4 roommates listed, 4 beds, all of us responsible for the full amount of the rent. But, we were absolutely allowed to reside in the same home. Same thing in college - single lease for four people in a four bedroom apartment.
Edit - post college was Northern VA (DC Metro). College was UVA, Charlottesville, VA.
Edit 2 - partially answering my own question... For Fairfax Co, VA...
Can a home or dwelling unit have multiple renters?
Generally, no more than one family, plus two renters, may live together as a single household. Or, no more than four unrelated people may live in one house as a single household.https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/code/multiple-occupancymultipl...
All my past rentals were 4 people, so within the limit. And given the size of most homes (4 bedroom is typical), doesn't seem totally unreasonable (ADUs and "granny flats" count as separate homes, so not covered by the 4 person rule).
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.
These are challenges for people sharing housing, but they're not the legal reason why letting out rooms is illegal. Prohibitions on multifamily housing are all rooted in racial animus. It's the entire reason we have single-family zoning (a related legal proscription), which emerged very shortly after the Buchanan v Warley decision that outlawed outright racial zoning. There's a long and well-documented history of this, all the way down to regulations targeting multi-generational households (Black and Latino families are more likely to have a grandparent or aunt living alongside a younger family).
>There's a long and well-documented history of this, all the way down to regulations targeting multi-generational households (Black and Latino families are more likely to have a grandparent or aunt living alongside a younger family).
That really doesn't track with the laws actually written. Every single city I've lived in with restrictions on number of unrelated tenants, simultaneously has an exception that there are no limits on related parties, whether through blood or marriage.
They are very much limiting the number of unrelated people in a single dwelling and it's targeting slumlords, not the renters.
He didn't say all prohibitions rooted in racial animus targeted multi generational households. I knew a city where people said they supported unrelated tenant restrictions because they didn't want migrant workers living in their neighborhoods.
Secondary suites are desirable for multi generational households. They are or were banned in many places.
The cities where you lived allowed any number of related people in a 1 bedroom apartment? A 2 person per bedroom limit seems common. Related or not. And prohibition of a child sharing the bedroom of an adult or a different sex child or a different gender child.
tptacek nailed it with regards to it being historically racial, but I've also seen, to your point, animosity towards anything that isn't a "traditional" or nuclear family. Fear of the different and unknown is a powerful motivator of the people who bring these complaints. Also animosity towards poverty and the belief or perception of material increases in crime and/or traffic.
(property owner, many units, yimby, have to interface with the citizenry at zoning meetings, etc)
I'm sure in some/many cases there were racial motivations but also SROs that have many unrelated people in individual rooms often become seen as flophouses and are seen as undesirable by other property owners. So they are often prohibited at least in single-family zoned areas.
Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.
(as someone who has acquired lots, rezoned, and have contracted to have multifamily built in such areas)
I do agree that one contributor to the housing crisis in many areas is the lack of SRO and boarding houses, which used to be much more common at least in urban areas. Those are all largely gone now, and they used to be common entry-level housing options for young singles.
If I owned a house would I object to the neighbor taking in a boarder or two? No, but I could see being unhappy about them moving out and turning the house into an SRO rental, especially if those tenants created a nuisance in the neighborhood. Same as a problematic Air BnB.
I think a good compromise might be allowing SRO/boarding if the owner also lives in the house. That is what my town is discussing for at least some residential neighborhoods.
SROs should also be more often allowed in already multifamily/high density residental areas.
> Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.
Property owners are absolutely entitled to their property but that also includes things like noise, sanitation, and crime. It's called an HOA or a master planned community and approximately 30% of the US population lives in one.
Few people like HOAs but still engage in them despite all the downsides because they specifically don't want to live in high density housing where people are packing 10 or 15 unrelated people to a house, inviting crime, noise, sanitary issues, and all the other negatives of high density housing.
Most people who engage in a HOA do so because existing regulation requires newly developed subdivisions to create their own local government to do the work of providing streets, etc, that should be done by the existing city government.
it's called an HOA or a master planned community and its a voluntary agreement between homeowners, not something any one homeowner is entitled to over the protestations of others. People who want to join an HOA are entitled to do that, and people who don't are entitled to not, but that's different from the law because the law is not optional or voluntary. It is, by its very nature, a restriction on the liberties of people without their express consent. What you're talking about is very, very different and deserves to be discussed independently of this.
Property owners absolutely are entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density, and I say this as someone who also has done similar work to you.
If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
>If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.
>If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
That's not what I'm talking about at all. Zoning regulations should reflect the desires of a community, and there's no inherent reason they can't be more restrictive than yimbys would like.
Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them. They naturally want to pull the ladder up.
But if you just let them, then there's 0 new homes being built in the US. And then the economy implodes.
We have to toe a line necessarily. If you just allow the tragedy of the commons to happen 100%, then everyone loses. Everyone, including those who benefit.
Its like feudalism. Feudalism seems like a fantastic idea if you're a feudal lord. But... Its actually not. No, you lose too.
Imagine how much richer those feudal lords could have been had they not impeded the progress of Europe for hundreds of years.
> Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them.
Upzoning actually increases land values, because it gives you the option to develop your land into a higher-productivity use (and hence higher potential rents).
NIMBYs in my observation tend to be anti-change; they bought with the neighbourhood a particular way and want it to stay that way. Upzoning brings in a change in the vibe and demographic that they don't want.
Exactly. Most people don't buy a home with the hope that the surroundings will change drastically. And of course is there is a change for the better, the same people who complain about about NIMBYs will complain about gentrification.
> Zoning regulations should reflect the desires of a community
The community can express its desires by building whatever kind of housing they want on their property. What you're talking about is my property having to reflect the desires of the rest of the community.
It's not a severe limitation to tell someone that everyone who lives in an area agreed to something that they'll have to adhere to if they want to live there also.
you used the word "entitled" though, and that has a specific meaning. why would nimbys be "entitled" to stop high density housing but yimbys not be "entitled" to do it? this contradiction resolves itself very neatly in a system where yimbys get to do what they want with their property and nimbys get to do what they want with theirs. It only gets complex when one person wants complete control of their property and also partial control over someone else's, and they dress up their own personal best interest as "the desires of the community".
Because "yimby"s go to higher government to force localities to adopt rules they vote against, i.e. they get their way with authoritarian policies that apply outside of "their backyard". Some even think there should be national laws! They want their policies applied to essentially an entire continent. Nimbys typically don't care about things that are not part of their locality. San Francisco wants giant skyscrapers? Cool, none in my city, thanks. That's why we chose to live in an area that bans high density.
From what I've seen the actual policies being pushed by "yimbys" seem much closer to yiyby.
Obviously I don't care about that freedom. Just like I don't care about the freedom to put up ugly billboards on your land. That's why we bought a home in an area that bans those things. It also requires ugly parking lots to be set back behind a tree line, and new residential developments must have bike trails that connect to the wider network. I'm happy for you to live somewhere where you have that freedom though. I know "no rules" appeals to some!
So you don't care about other people's freedoms but yimbys are bad because they're "authoritarian". Got it, totally cool, logical, and consistent.
You could just be honest and say "I want to use government power to suit my needs, even if it costs other people. But no one else can do that". It's pretty selfish but at least we'll know where you stand.
Yeah that's why I moved somewhere where those were the agreed local regulations and everyone else was on the same page. That's why local governance is good. Everyone can find somewhere where they can be happy.
You can't know that though. Unless you hold a referendum to renew the rules every year and they pass by a 100% majority.
The only honest way to do it is without invoking government power. Move to a gated community. Have a neighborhood association, funded solely by residents, whose bylaws require that it gets to have any property up for sale in the community as long as it matches any other accepted offer on it.
If you want your "dream community" spend your own money. Don't go into other people's pockets.
I don't subscribe to pure anarchism. We also have local public schools, parks, libraries, bike trails, etc. funded by "other people's" (our) pockets. It's fine. The US at least has 10 million sq km. Plenty of room for different types of communities to exist. The are cities in multiple directions a few miles away with less restrictive zoning if people like the area but want apartments, townhomes, or advertising.
And this is because individual property rights must not be sacrosanct in a civilized society.
We already have a number of rules of what you can and can't do with your private property that I think most people agree on. You can't build a slaughterhouse right in the middle of a residential area. You can't dump your garbage into the water flowing through your property. Etc.
Those are rules we all agree on because they have immediate and very visible primary effects.
The things we're talking about now are less visible secondary effects, but they're still very real.
The ability of our entire society to be able to securely and affordably house all its members is a much stronger imperative than the ability of people in any particular area to have nice views, or neighbors who all share the same socioeconomic class/skin color/native language as them.
We should probably try to keep them to a minimum though, lest we stifle innovation. You wouldn't want to stifle innovation, would you? Or inadvertently destroy shareholder value?
There are all kinds of desires local communities might have that are proscribed by state law. Why should this one be different? If you don't want those laws passed, organize for a candidate who will oppose them. If the state goes the other way on a land-use issue within that state, it's hard for me to see why there's some moral mandate that local NIMBYs be allowed to overrule them.
The whole theoretical conception of property rights is that a property right is the right to control what happens on your property, which implies you don't have the right to control what happens on other people's property, because that right belongs to other people. You can't eat your cake and have it.
If you want property to be a neighbourhood thing then you should also be required to let the benefits of your own property accrue to your whole neighbourhood and not just yourself. So no tall fences for example. How come everyone else should have to do what you want, but you shouldn't have to do what everyone else wants?
My neighborhood does in fact ban any kind of front yard fence, and I'd have to check but the only backyard fences I recall seeing are those around pools, which are legally required for child safety reasons.
> The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.
Of course.
> Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
Pro-housing people in my area absolutely are trying to force people to do things with their property and in their neighborhood by barring covenants and other restrictions that can be put in place by municipalities and HOAs.
Barring restrictions is absolutely not “forcing” anyone to do anything. Take away all restrictions on my lot and I am still not forced to develop on it.
A law negating a covenant everyone entered into willingly and freely does kinda alter the deal after its made. I do wholeheartedly agree that removing zoning restrictions doesn't impinge on anyone's liberty though.
If that was the case i.e. nobody wanted to build anything new on their land why would the “convenant” be necessary. Or is the idea that former owners can impose these decisions they made on anyone they sell the property to?
We allow all sorts of encumbrances to transfer with property. You can sell a house with an easement that lets neighbors use some amount of your property for access, with a tenant who has a contractual right to stay to the end of a lease regardless of what the new owner wants, or with a covenant to limit development. Hell, a couple years back an entire mall sold for $20 with the agreement that the buyer was assuming all of the seller's debt and also the seller's contractual obligation to perform road maintenance. If you couldn't transfer these agreements with a sale they'd be useless even absent a sale. Either no one would buy the property because its unsellable and the value would plummet or you would buy it with the encumbrances, transfer ownership from your left hand to your right hand to remove them and then do what you want.
It may surprise you but I’m not actually scared of that happening. I’m actually zoned for the house next door to me to turn into a seven story building, which many in my city think is horrifying, but I’m not scared of that either.
Honestly the biggest reason I became a pro-density advocate is because low-density communities are almost always tax-revenue-negative[1], given that the cost of things like roads, water and sewer infrastructure scale with land area. What NIMBYs often seem to want are the amenities of city living (like a sewer instead of a septic tank in your yard) without the people, and that just doesn’t work.
The suburbs I've lived in have spent far more on things that scale with population (primarily education) than things that scale with area. You also can't split revenue from downtown commercial areas out from surrounding residential like that. Are businesses "subsidizing" residents? Of course not. That doesn't even make sense as a question.
Look, the people making this argument all come from a fairly aligned political unit. If you start hearing this perspective from a broad coalition of ideologically diverse groups, it would mean the thesis has become consensus. I agree with you that the guy's tone is not great, so here's a slightly different framing: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/4/17/sprawl-is-... (strong towns' emphasis is on ending federal infrastructure loans that leave cities and suburbs with infrastructure they don't have the tax base to maintain over a generation. Which I think leads to similar conclusions but they're careful not to say that).
Their framing also highlights the important financial difference between children and sewers, though: the former get less expensive and more productive over time, and the latter do the opposite, which is how the problems happen.
Fiscal soundness at the local level should not be a political issue, but IMO the progressive left has turned it into one by attacking anyone and everyone who isn't in rigid alignment with every element of their housing agenda, which includes some pretty radical (and largely undesirable) changes for most Americans. And then of course when people balk at these undesirable changes, they're called racist, selfish, or both.
I don't agree that you can really claim one part of town is subsidizing others based on the analysis from firms like urban3. Sure, if you stuck 10 businesses on a plot of land where only 1 exists now and those businesses all thrive, tax revenue would be higher for that plot of land. Is there demand for 10 more businesses in your city or town, times every drive thru fast food joint or Starbucks? Is it actually a problem that businesses are paying more in taxes than they consume in services, which lets residents pay less than they consume? Would those businesses be there if their owners couldn't live in the type of housing they wanted in the city? There are so many intertwined issues that seem impossible to decouple to me, in addition to the obvious issue that the school system is the primary consumer of tax revenue in almost every area and the taxes paid by parents don't come close to covering that expense.
It's also not a coincidence that they picked an economically depressed area with a fairly high crime rate for this analysis. If they looked at a city with residents who made the median household income for the US, or even above it, I suspect you'd see a very different picture (though the larger point is still worth considering and largely valid).
I do agree completely that the federal and state governments are just setting these places up for failure (and future rounds of external funding), but I don't see YIMBYs talking about that. They just seem to be angry that people are living more comfortably than they would like in lower density housing instead of embracing the urban lifestyle they are so passionate about, and want to force everyone to align to their vision not for fiscal stability, but for ideological reasons.
> If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right
This is an opinion, not a right codified in statute, and state laws can be enacted to override local planning ability to prevent upzoning. People who live in their community are entitled to affordable housing (again, my opinion, maybe not yours). Property owners leave, property owners die; the path to success is to simply continue to grind against the nimby machine.
I disagree that people are entitled to affordable housing where they desire to live. There are neighborhoods I could not afford to live in, and I am not entitled to live there. I live where I can afford, and this is the case up and down the market. If I want to live in some community, it's up to me to be able to afford it.
That said, if I can afford to buy property and want to build higher-density lower-cost rental housing on it, that should generally be my right as well.
The issue isn't that some communities are expensive. The issue is the deliberate engineering of extra housing expense extrinsic to the market itself using the force of law, which is a capability home rule grants exclusionary communities if not policed carefully.
> Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.
Of course they're entitled to stop efforts to change the world around them. If you moved into a neighborhood with a minimum lot size was X acres, it's a reasonable expectation that it remains as such. If someone comes along and not only wants to change that, but also build multi unit apartment complexes across the street from you, why should you not have a say? Clearly the person was not allowed to do that before changing the zoning rules so why can't I try to stop them from changing them at all?
There's nothing racist about wanting to live a quiet suburban or rural life where you can neither see nor hear the next house over.
People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change. This is very understandable. Using force of law to maintain aesthetic levels and social class divides is where the perverse incentives set in. The US Supreme Court approved the earliest zoning laws based on health justification. The dicta in the court opinion cited cities as parasitically infringing on bucolic greenery. We now see the logical endpoint of restrictive zoning. Million dollar houses that are mostly the right to live at that address (the structure is small and worn). Landlords having tremendous power over tenants.
>People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change.
Correct, people making what is for most the largest financial investment and commitment of their lives want to have control over what happens to it. When you have a 30 year mortgage on a piece of property that is many times your gross yearly income, you're kind of invested in the most literal sense of the word.
It would be one thing if the re-zoning included an offer to buy or move every house within X distance that has property values and "standard of living" directly affected by the re-zoning. But in almost all cases when the re-zoning occurs, the response is: sucks to be you.
I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the developer will make more money if it's in an already developed area, at the expense of all the existing homeowners.
> There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why?
Because the vision of quarter acre blocks from sea to sea is gut-wrenching and we would prefer to limit the bounds of human building so that some forests and wild lands remain.
>I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not.
I think a large part of the problem is that states and to a lesser degree the feds are trying to compensate for problems created by places like SV (not that every state doesn't have comparable places doing similar) so they write rules that incentivize X or Y and so you wind up with weird "a bunch of duplex townhouses on .2ac" developments in the middle of nowhere and other places they don't make sense because developers are naturally pairing the incentivized types of construction with the cheapest suitable land.
OK, now extend that line of thought just a little bit further.
Why will the developer make more money if it's in an already developed area?
Because that area has better access to shops, schools, and workplaces.
Sure, you could build a giant apartment building out on the edge of town—the land would certainly be cheaper!
But, given how things are today, it's unlikely you'd ever fill it in a way that would recoup your investment. In order to make something like that work, what we'd really need is proper public transport that reliably stopped at (or near) such a development, with well-sited stops in town in order to allow residents to do all the things they need to do. To reach the things that are in the town.
There's nothing intrinsically racist about having lot size preferences, but the lot sizes we have in most 20th century vintage zoning codes are in fact racist by design. Minimum lot sizes were a way of keeping Black families from crossing borders from redlined ghettoes into white neighborhoods or suburbs, by preventing people from subdividing lots into smaller, more affordable houses.
Meanwhile: it's perfectly understandable that people don't want to see change in their neighborhood, or that they buy a property in the expectation that everything good about it will remain. But that's not a reasonable constraint for the law to operate under. You do not in fact have a strict right to control things that happen outside the borders of your own lot.
Some community restrictions are reasonable. We broadly agree that it's not OK for someone to open a tannery in the middle of a suburban residential block. Others are not; for instance, neighbors several blocks over will argue that they have a right not to endure extra traffic when our local hospital, the largest employer and best hospital in the region, plans a small addition.
The most important phenomenon here is hyperlocalism. The immediate neighbors of new proposed residential developments will reliably oppose it. They'll also make up the overwhelming majority of those who show up for public comment, because normal people don't turn out to support new apartment buildings built across town. But if you accept that resistance as a given right, you're essentially saying nothing will ever get built.
The muni I'm in has managed to go from 70,000 residents to 50,000 by consistently applying this strategy, so it's not even accurate to say it's about "change", so much as it is about strangling out as many residents as possible to achieve a targeted demography.
Sure, but part of the point of in-effect racist zoning policies is that the affected population is predominately the targeted minority. It would be more effective and more equitable to address the actual issues created by flophouses.
Single-family zoned areas by definition only have single-family homes, and only some families will be able to afford those homes. The designers of such policies are often well-aware that the only families affluent enough to purchase or rent a home in such an area is of the preferred race (thanks to the strong racial correlation to socioeconomic class, as well as historic explicit racist policies like redlining, employment and education segregation, etc etc).
To be clear, I don't believe that single-family zoning is necessarily racist, especially with the continued democratization of the middle class. Single-family zoning is bad for a lot of reasons. Its just that it is absolutely the case that historically single family zoning was deliberately used in several cases as a racist policy, but in such a way that it would pass muster in court.
I don't know what the racial origins are, but I have grown skeptical of many racial explanations, because they're often simplistic, speculative, and often lack a comprehension and awareness of the greater social context and events occurring around the middle of the century, like the intentional weaponization of "racism" against ethnic neighborhoods that were not assimilating into the ever-nebulous category of "whiteness". (Mass migration is one classic instrument, as are highways and bad urban planning. In the first case, mass migration from the South was used to break up ethnic neighborhoods in the North, causing their scattering across the suburbs to hasten assimilation. You could have used practically any outside group, but the convenience here was that it exploited the moral high ground of the civil rights movement, allowing opposition to mass migration to be cast as an expression of racism.)
However, ascribing opposition to "fear of the unknown" as a motivator is likewise lazy. It works from the assumption that a) the nuclear family is arbitrary and thus have no presumption in their favor, and b) that there is no tolerance for substitutes for the nuclear family, in the strict sense. It's not like most people are clamoring to live in a polyamorist sex commune, so it's not a good explanation.
The whole race thing is a red herring. Pretty much every "racist" law outside of the former confederacy was written with the Irish in mind and last I checked they were just as white (technically whiter if you want to hair split) as the wasps who championed those laws.
Those people back then were trying use government force to make it harder for people to live in ways they didn't like in the via regulation all the same as people do here and now in 2025. They used race/nationality as a proxy for that insofar as it was an accurate proxy (which is why in the US it largely fell out of favor starting in the 1950s after the culturally flattening effect of the depression + ww2).
Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit, because to take a step back and assess the fundamentals of the sort of rulemaking being advocated for would be detrimental to their cause(s).
Note that the Irish were not considered white throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and into the early 20th century. See eg. "How the Irish became white":
There were plenty of "NINA" ("No Irish Need Apply") signs throughout the North, the same way we had Jim Crow laws in the South. Other groups too: Poles and Jews were also not considered "white" during this time period, and then gradually assimilated as the nation's racial animus was focused elsewhere. JFK's election as the nation's first Irish-Catholic president was as significant in 1960 as Barack Obama's election as the first Black president in 2008.
Racism as it exists in America is socially constructed, but tribalism is universal. Interestingly different parts of the U.S. have different racial divides, eg. the black/white divide is not nearly so salient on the West Coast, but there is significantly more anti-Mexican racism and economic classism.
Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind. But much of American zoning post-WW2 is a reaction to the Great Migration and concomitant phenomena like redlining, which created new neighborhood and municipal borders that were defended in part by shrink-wrapping inhospitable zoning codes around existing residents.
A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design, but he also traveled the country building these de facto redlining codes all across the continent.
> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
>Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind.
And who was the "no mobile homes" addendum written for?
You're using "racist = bad" as an excuse to avoid evaluating the premise of the law, which itself is bad too. It doesn't matter that the law is racist. There are tons and tons of areas in the zoning code that are just as bad because they inherent from the same premise of micromanagement, not being racially motivated doesn't make them good. The whole race thing is a red herring.
This is BS, and race was absolutely part of the equation. The covenants to my parent's house in the SFBAY literally say no black people can live on the property unless they're servants. It's no longer enforceable today, but it absolutely was when their house was newly built.
One thing you can never depend on racists for is consistency.
There are political cartoons drawn by fascists from the 1920s that attempt to stave off accusations of racism by pointing out that they include Italians (then show Mussolini as a racist caricature of a black man), as if Italians aren't widely considered white.
If you look at how the British and later Americans talked about the Irish "people" or "race", you'll note shocking similarities to how they talked about Africans, Native Americans, Asians of all stripes, etc etc. Explicit skin color rarely came up.
Racism, especially old timey racism, is all about "how do I define my group as 'good' and everybody else as so bad that I can treat them worse?"
Just for curiosity's sake, when you talk about Italians being widely considered white what context is that in? Because you later talk about anti-Irish racism in the US in the 20s and 30s and the experience was pretty similar for Italians in the US in that time period as well. I have living relatives that can give you firsthand accounts of open, organized, violent anti-Italian racism in Pittsburgh pre-mid WWII.
I mean modern day. What I'm trying to express is that "nobody today would be racist against $whateverGroup$!" has precisely zero bearing on what absolute batshit lunacy people were racist about even 50 years ago.
Its also the case that even in the 1920s, while there was a lot of anti-Italian racism, people generally saw that Italian heritage was better than African heritage.
This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism.
> Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit,
You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things, so I'm very confused. Do you somehow think that removing restrictions on unrelated tenancies is going to "micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways "?
>This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism.
Regardless of exactly which laws were passed to make living the "wrong" way hard for which demographics the fact of the matter is that race-baiting is purely a distraction and manipulative debate tactic here. The laws are bad on a fundamental level. To use "law is racist, therefore bad" is to engage in a logical slight of hand to avoid the question "if it's bad for municipalities to regulate in this manner why ought states be allowed to do it". Most local zoning codes, if not evaluated by a judicial system highly biased toward the government, would fail the Penn Central test in many places. Simply porting that level of micromanagement to the state level and then scaling it back from 11 to 7 doesn't make the fundamental premise of what's going on here (the government essentially taking land via regulation, to the detriment of owners and communities in the longer term) any less odious. Yeah, not cranking it to 11 does mostly solve it in the moment, but that's like replacing an bad king with a benevolent one. This just isn't an area the government ought to be regulating to the degree that it is. Yeah there's some extreme examples (toxic waste dumps and whatnot) but neither state nor local nor federal government has any business telling people where they can't put apartments or warehouses or other mild things like that.
These laws are bad because the government has no legitimate authority to micromanage the housing stock (and other things) on the fine grained level it does. The sum total of regulations effectively amount to a taking without compensation. They might also be racist in some cases, but that's on top of an already flawed premise.
>You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things
No, I'm saying this in reply to someone who's pretending to want to deregulate but simply wants to regulate in a different way. It's a more permissive way and an overall improvement but the premise is still flawed. Having state regulation that says municipalities can't zone away X, Y and Z simply moves the bickering over minutia from the town hall to the state legislature. It's like adding more and more rules to a geocentric solar system model. You'll get better and better but it's still not right at its core.
Why aren't they? Because what appears to have been an obvious point to everyone else isn't you you:
My point is, across multiple states, and various cities, I've never run across an instance without a family carve-out. I even went through the trouble of picking random large cities throughout the US and literally every one of them has a carve out. Unless you can provide some data otherwise, why is your comment relevant to this discussion? What value were you trying to add?
"Prohibitions on multifamily housing are all rooted in racial animus". That's not true even if part of your statement is true.
Many prohibitions are based on moral reasonings outside of race. You couldn't rent a hotel room in most places if you were not married regardless of race.
I’m pretty sure the law has a lot more to do with existing property owners trying to preserve the value of their own property, than it has to do with lobbyists hating Democrat party bloc voters for literally no reason at all.
Though the latter story does get out the ol’ vote. I guess working class people with a mortgage are the Kulaks now.
We're discussing zoning codes that were essentially set in the 1940s and 50s, and have only been incrementally adjusted since then. "Democrat/Republican" wasn't a salient distinction for this issue at the time (and much of the Democratic base had the opposite racial salience.)
> Part of the problem is the law isn't designed for shared housing
That’s part of the problem, but this article is actually about explicit legal limits on sharing, not merely that sharing, where allowed, isn’t always legally convenient.
Forcing things to go through the full ass reaming of the "everything else" process rather than whatever less terrible process was written to make some "supported" thing streamlined enough to not cause uproar.
The purpose of the system is what it does. They don't want to make doing "bad" things easy so they let your only option be through the same absurd catch-all process.
In my experience, it's a lot easier to kick out a roommate than a tenant. If you share a kitchen or a bathroom with somebody, then most tenant protection laws don't apply. Once you share a bathroom or kitchen, then "not getting along" is enough of an excuse for it to become a safety issue.
One interesting thing about roommates is the landlord can't discriminate, but the roommates can discriminate against other roommates on any basis they want if they reside in the same dwelling, at least in the U.S.
> 2/ From a legal discriminatory standpoint, the law doesn't have much protections for people blocking certain raises or genders from renting.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but why is this a problem? When you're living in such close quarters with people, you should have some freedom in choosing who you're living with. The classic example would be a "female only" household that doesn't allow men for real or perceived safety reasons. There are also cultures/religions where cohabitation with those of the opposite sex is taboo.
The race angle is more thorny, but I'd rather lean in the direction of allowing people to choose who they co-habitate with.
Some freedom? My house is my safe space, it's the place I go when I'm exhausted, when I'm sick, when the rest of the world sucks.
I should have a very high degree of freedom over who is allowed to share that space with me and I shouldn't have to justify not allowing another person (stranger or not) to co-habitate.
The amount of people in a boarding house or shared occupancy is low enough that they can easily be all mutually trusted friends or acquaintances to one another. Why should people be forced by law to admit strangers that they might not be fully comfortable with into that kind of tightly-knit arrangement?
In a true boarding house, the landlord/owner controls who lives there - each room is rented individually. Individual tenants have zero control over who lives in the next room.
But, yes, if you have a typical shared home, where 4 people get together and rent a home at once, yes, you do have that control (and should have it).
Actually, if they rent the home, then they still don't have that control. The landlord does. S/he is free to put someone you don't like in the upstairs unit. Or even in the 5th bedroom of the house if it's a room letting type situation.
No matter what. You rent? Yeah, sorry. The landlord makes the rules.
The hypothetical foursome would need to purchase their property. At that point, they would be able to control for who could live there.
If a group of tenants and the landlord all sign a "joint and several" lease for a house or multibedroom apartment, nobody can make changes until that lease agreement expires (at least not without the agreement of everyone on the lease).
If it's an SRO lease where they are leasing just a single room and access to common areas then yes the landlord can lease rooms as he can find tenants for them.
Material point is that people are misapprehending the direction of control here.
The tenants have zero control.
The only people allowed to reside at the property, are people the landlord has allowed to do so. Those approved residents are not allowed to then decide to allow different people to reside at the property. Even new tenants sought out in an attempt to sublease, will have to be endorsed by the landlord. Not the current tenants.
People on this thread appear to believe tenants get these rights. No. Tenants get a different set of rights. They can decide who they want to live with. But they cannot decide who they want to live with in a given landlord's house. The landlord gets the right to decide who can reside at the property. Full stop. That the tenants believe X is a great guy is irrelevant to the deliberations of the vast majority of landlords. If you insist on living with X, then you'll have to find another property to rent if X is not agreeable to the landlord.
And the law backs up the landlord's dispassionate disposition on approving residents.
Basically you can choose your roommates, and you are then constrained in the places you're allowed to reside. That constraint being only those places willing to accept all of your roommates.
> Those approved residents are not allowed to then decide to allow different people to reside at the property. Even new tenants sought out in an attempt to sublease, will have to be endorsed by the landlord. Not the current tenants.
Depends on what your lease says. The owner can give that option.
The landlord cannot legally give you the right to weigh in on a separate lease (SRO) if you'll make decisions using a protected class (i.e. you only want a particular sex in the SRO).
Depends on where and local laws. In San Francisco you can swap roommates out one for one and they landlord can not reasonably stop you. They can request an application if they want but they can’t reject them unless they have a very good reason. Most landlords don’t bother to waste their time.
Yeah, you're being way more pedantic than I was a few posts up.
My point was only that in an SRO/boarding house situation, the tenant has no control, and at any given point in time, the tenant in the next room could change.
And in a shared home "joint and several" lease situation, the tenants control who can live in the home at the beginning of the lease (but, yes, they're effectively locked into that arrangement for the duration of the lease).
Yes, in both cases, the landlord generally has more power than the tenants. That wasn't my point.
As a practical matter, the landlord will be happy to lease to any group of people who all want to live with each other and who are financially qualified to pay the rent.
And if the landlord is being selective on the basis of race or other protected class, that's flat-out illegal.
> The classic example would be a "female only" household that doesn't allow men for real or perceived safety reasons. There are also cultures/religions where cohabitation with those of the opposite sex is taboo.
The solution to the “female only” or the religiously observant household is for the renters/buyers to self-select and organize themselves. I don’t see why the landlord/seller needs to mandate it.
The solution to the “female only” or the religiously observant household is for the renters/buyers to self-select and organize themselves. I don’t see why the landlord/seller needs to mandate it.
I think it's because the only two options being presented are a group of people signing one lease with one landlord. Or a group of people individually signing leases with the landlord.
So basically, the problem is for people that can't find a group on their own. Or for a landlord who wants to act like every room is an apartment, when they're clearly not.
You can't find a group of people to share a lease with, but you want to live in a residence which excludes people by race or gender? Sounds like a you problem.
There are a significant amount of people who care about gender such that it makes sense for landlords to discriminate by shared unit. They should have a mix of male only and female only units. (and if they want mix units). In the US not enough people care about the religion of their roommate to be worthwhile trying to find a fair solution to those who care (if you do care you can ask at your church).
It is important to ensure that when you allow such discrimination it is by unit and that landlords not be allowed to discriminate overall
The problem currently isn't the landlords, but the tenants and subtenants. Maybe if landlords could offer more shared housing, this problem would go away. But tenants frequently look for people of the same gender or race to rent a shared housing.
The other (smaller) issue I think is house hackers (landlord occupied properties). The landlord doesn't own multiple units and is effectively "airbnb-ing" out rooms for short term leases.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. The typical roommate situation around here is between two or four in one unit. Maybe it was harder in the days before the internet, but I expect that even then the kinds of tight-knit religious communities that would be opposed to cohabiting outside the faith would have the internal social networking infrastructure to solve this problem.
How does social media solve the issue? I don't think it matters if the landlord or the tenant is advertising sexist/racist housing opportunities, its still sexist and racist, blocking certain groups from accessing housing.
Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.
Huh? Who said anything about social media? Churches and other religious organizations are basically designed to promote and foster these kinds of in-group relationships.
> Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.
It would be very strange to tell someone they can’t decide their own roommate because their selection would be “racist/sexist.” I’m trying to imagine how you would even go about enforcing that at the individual level. Is your plan to assign housing randomly with some centralized lottery system? Extract affadavits from prospective tenants?
Do you believe it’s sexist for a heterosexual woman to use a dating website to look for a husband and not a wife? I don’t see why your logic wouldn’t apply there.
Landlords/sellers aren't typically the limiting on gender (because they legally cant), but the renters/buyer's "self-select" process is sexist/racist. People post advertisements on FB looking for a new roommate of certain type.
If anything, landlords in my area subrenting / house hacking are better at managing a home with mixed race / gender than people "self-selecting" with racist/sexist ads.
> is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?
Too many unrelated people living in a housing unit is illegal. Here’s San Francisco’s version of this law which was used to shut down house sharing companies such as HubHaus; see definition of “family” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...
The article also mentioned dormitory-like “group housing” apartments (which differ from housing units in that they don’t have a separate kitchen for each unit). San Francisco is pretty enlightened in that it allows group housing in many zoning districts, but even they have group housing density limits and now common space requirements which are designed to prevent much group housing (see definition of “group housing” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).
There is a separate contract with each tenant (i.e., multiple contracts), and each tenant is only responsible for paying for their private area.
This differs from a roommate situation in that there is generally one contract with the entire group.
Similarly with subletting: there is one contract with the landlord and the 'main' tenant, and then that tenant then turns around creates separate contract between them and another tenant.
My impression is that boarding house usually includes some services (cleaning, maintenance, food) from the owner or an employee who lives on the premises.
Yes, the situation with shared common areas and private bedrooms individually leased is more typically called "single room occupancy" (SRO) and is often prohibited by local rental codes.
Where I live there is discussion about allowing it in some neighborhoods, with the requirement that the property owner is also resident in the house.
I'm not an expert on the legal mechanisms but I believe it's a combination of all of those things through a hodgepodge of various local zoning regulations which the article references: limits on the number of unrelated people living in the same home where the limit varies by locality (i've always heard of these as anti-brothel regulations). Limits on number of leases in a single space or requirements for each leasable unit to have its own bathroom and/or kitchen. Requirements that each tenant have their own parking space. Lots of creative ways cooked up by local regulators across the vast USA to discourage anything but single-family homes occupied by single families.
Even what you described (single lease, 4 roommates) is very common and usually allowed but the single lease part is what self-limits the impact of boarding-house type places. You need to find 3 other people to go in on this place with. You need to trust those other people and coordinate lease payments and utility payments and deal with it when some of them to decide to move on. That's a headache!
> or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room
Based on personal experiences I would say that it's only individual leases that are illegal. I lived in an SRO back in college without even realizing it was an SRO, rooms were rented out individually and everyone had a separate lease.
The more common version of this is to just do it privately with your friends or other people that you meet. If that's illegal then that will be news to me and like half my friends that currently live with roommates. Doing it privately raises a number of issues around housing discrimination. A landlord cannot stop you from renting a unit/room but there's nothing stopping a roommate from refusing to sign with you if they don't like some characteristic about you, granted in reality you probably wouldn't want to have that person as a roommate anyways.
Granted there might have been laws in place where I used to rent that capped the number of un-related folks living together but in my experience the landlord never brought it up, likely cause they knew enforcement would just never happen.
I’m not sure what the article is complaining about. I know 2 per bedroom is widely allowed in the US. But more isn’t. It seems like the article is looking to revitalize the concept of a large dormitory where people mostly just come to sleep. Maybe I’m wrong but the article doesn’t do a good job of saying what the problem is.
Either way I don’t think most millennials want more than 2 per room anyway.
The problem is that there's a "housing crisis" (which really just means that desirable places are more expensive than people would like for the most part, because homelessness is not up significantly since that term became popular to my knowledge) largely created by a lack of new housing starts in those areas, and existing laws bar people from circumventing that with alternative arrangements.
I don't understand why local governments feel like they need to regulate every aspect of a household. Enact laws against the negative externalities that are associated with SRO occupancy if the existing residents want them, and then leave things alone.
It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.
Like I can see why life in a house with 5 people might in some ways be more difficult than life in a house with 4 or 3, but I don't see why it should be illegal. People can think about these things for themselves and decide what works for them.
Sure, most houses won't accommodate 5 roommates, but there also a lot of extremely large houses in this country. Is there any benefit at all to having some weird, arbitrary 4 person cap? Like a cap per area of space might make sense, but just a limit of 4 regardless of anything?
Everything in the US is legally regulated to such an absurd degree. Where I live a gym needs a certain number of parking spaces per square feet. A clothing store needs a different number. A restaurant yet another different number. A business needs to have electrical outlets every so many feet. Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need? No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.
I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom" (because that's super effective).
I agree - I only meant reasonable in relation to typical home sizes.
If there's a grand old 6 bedroom house in a downtown area, it would probably make sense to allow 6 unrelated tenants. My only concern there would be homeowners subdividing rooms ad infinitum to get more tenants. But, there are probably solutions to that that don't involve arbitrary caps on household size.
Sure, like I mentioned in my post above it could be based on square feet. Or the number of toilets. Or bedrooms with windows. Or any number of other things and I would be sympathetic.
It just drives me nuts that the average local politician doesn't seem to care about carefully designing regulations or pruning back the near endless stack of existing, poorly design regulations. We've been stacking stupid on stupid for more than 100 years and it makes doing anything in the real world (building a house, running a local business, etc...) pointlessly tortuous.
Or, you could let people decide how large a bedroom they are willing to rent and stop micromanaging/over-regulating every bit of real estate, which is why the costs are too high.
The original intent of such regulations was not having tenements where people would perish in event of a fire. In 2016 36 people died in the Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.
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.
Well, I didn't know the origin, that's interesting. I'm still very skeptical of the rule.
There are other fire safety rules in the US that are considered sacred, like residential buildings more than three floors having multiple staircases, but these building codes don't exist in Japan or Europe and fire deaths per capita are just about the same. Meanwhile, it significantly increases the cost of building housing in the US.
I imagine there are lots of places without this socket rule, and if some economist would look at the rates of electrical fires between these places, that would be amazing.
I just hate this pattern of regulation in general. Step 1: identify problem (some building materials can cause cancer). Step 2: Come up with some countermeasure (put a sign on every building saying that the building materials might cause cancer). And then they stop. They forgot step 3! Step 3: Check if your countermeasure actually did anything useful! Did cancer rates go down after prop 65? Yes, but when when you control for smoking rates, no, the effect of prop 65 seems to be nothing.
It might actually do better with less parking... as that can lead to a more pleasurable pedestrian experience. Of course, that requires a certain level of density and proximity to housing (or common/shared parking).
But, generally, parking feels like something "the market" would solve pretty well sans regulation.
> It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.
It's not a set number...Municipalities can set this as low as 2 or as high as whatever.
As to why - go and ask them? Presumably it's what the local voters wanted, or at least the most vocal ones that cared to show up to council meetings and such.
> I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom"
> Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need?
The last people I expect to know how much of a resource they need are small business owners. Parking regulations are there when there isn't sufficient street or garage parking. It should be obvious that a restaurant needs more parking spots than say, a dry cleaner, so they shouldn't have the same burden. Parking capacity is inelastic, so if you under build then businesses and traffic suffer. Meanwhile if you overbuild, you're stuck maintaining empty parking lots and have inefficient use of space. It makes a ton of sense to me for this to be tightly regulated.
> No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.
I mean if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers. The outlet stuff comes from building codes like the IBC which is widely used (and as the saying goes, written in blood).
As always when you have a beef with your local government the solution is to get involved instead of complaining on the internet. The barrier to entry is shockingly low.
> if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers
Unfortunately parking mandates and other building regulations are often set directly by politicians. There was some interesting insight into the political input to Seattle’s proposed planning updates last year - https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/16/planners-proposed-big...
> 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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.'
It was 1991 and we pooled money from 10 people. The house was super cheap ($60k) and in a very depressed area (Attica, Indiana). The seller was a person and not a bank.
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.
Yep this place was around $60k for a big three story victorian in a crappy little town (former rail road hub between Indianapolis in Chicago). 4 big bedrooms, 2 small ones and 3 bathrooms.
Rent back in 1991 in the college town was around $600 per person and up... we made out like bandits but we did have to share cars.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Voters don't actually want house prices to come down. Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners. Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war. Perhaps because rents are downstream of values, and so it's politically easier for owners to make the correct choices to advance their agenda than it is for renters, which have an extra logical leap required of them.
> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war.
Demographics. Homeowners skew old, which gives them a bunch of advantages in enacting their political power. Higher turnout, baby boom giving them numerical superiority, and the time advantage of being able to enact policy decades ago.
In the US, this is supplemented by matters of race, where because of past redlining policies, "pro-homeowner" policy (esp. suburban single-family-homes) in the last half-century has been a way to primarily benefit white people.
You're forgetting the most important one. Having a bunch of your money tied up in an illiquid asset that is subject to all manner of government micromanagement gives you a huge incentive to see to it that the government doesn't get progressively more shitty toward you than it already is.
Yep, saying it's an age thing is missing that every homeowner is directly financially incentivized to ensure prices go up. I literally get physical printed mail (against my
will) every other week telling me about the health of my neighborhood where higher home sale prices means better. Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
> Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
No.
Being a homeowner doesn't grant one political influence. Being old grants one political influence.
It's the correlation of age and homeownership that means homeowners have the political influence the push through policy that drives up real estate prices.
Non-homeowners have political incentives all the same. If only just to oppose those very homeowners' policies. What they lack is the political influence to make it happen.
> Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners
I assure you, a lot of people in the UK want house prices to fall too. There are too many renters who don't want to be renting, and the proportion is increasing. They wish they could buy instead, but can't either because of price, inability to save enough for a down-payment as fast as prices rise (while large rent rises impede their saving or even drain it, and incomes rise more slowly than prices), or inability to obtain a mortgage despite a history of consistently paying more than a mortgage in rent. For the latter category, who can afford a mortgage but can't get one, and are already paying more in rent, their main problem isn't income or price, it's the tighter restrictions on mortgage availability since the 2008 financial crises. But they would still like lower prices.
Meanwhile to the original article, 80s TV like Golden Girls (shared housing) and Boosom Buddies (boarding houses) are quaint historic notes, the reality is that our use of housing stock has made the problem of where to live worse: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
When you dig down into the data, the article is highlighting a real problem. We have destroyed a lot of historical co-habitation that kept the system working and healthy. We did this with zoning (getting rid of high density to prop up home values) banning types of housing (dense single room, affordable) and making other types impossible (owning a home and renting a room or two, people dont do this because of tenants rights issues).
> Voters don't actually want house prices to come down.
>> You have this wrong.
But you don't refute this, if anything you make the case that, since the majority are homeowners, they would of course want ever-increasing home values. And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
If non voting renters showed up, this could easily swing the other way. Renters are (generally) unmotivated to change their destiny at the voting booth.
> And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
This is far far far more complicated than it looks. Because what is inflation vs increase in value after adjustment. There are plenty of places where housing has gone down in value (see Detroit, see Camden NJ). There are plenty of places where gentrification has changed whole regions (see the SF Bay Area).
There has also been a massive change in what we build (smaller homes, vs McMansions).
When you dig into the WHY of this, the destruction of old stock is a huge part of it (see Detroit). Massive changes to what and how we build (back to home owners and zoning) limiting growth in areas. Over regulation (see slow rebuilding in southern CA after fires, and the whole housing shortage here). NOTE: the ADU law that was an attempt to let home owners fix this themselves has been somewhat of a flop... however it is gaining momentum.
The fixes to housing in the US require voters to pass something where only a bit more than half of it would be "good" for them and in a hard to explain way. It is easy to get them to vote such a policy down when the 40 percent that might impact them makes for a clear cut argument for a NO.
Somehow? Homeowners are obviously the more powerful group, and real estate ownership in the bigger picture is tied to even more powerful entities (big companies, banks, billionaires).
How many in the top 10% of the wealth distribution do you think are renters?
How many in the bottom 20% do you think are homeowners?
In the 1970s, it was usual for working class newlyweds would have to live with their parents until they were able to find housing. That's why second-rate comedians of the time like Les Dawson had so many mother-in-law jokes: there was an awful lot of resentment between young men and their mothers-in-law to exploit. There's nothing new about multiple families crowding into houses designed for just one family in this country - that's why there are so many pubs.
The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been identified as a cause of insufficient housebuilding activity, and new legislation is currently working its way through the House of Lords to alleviate this.
In the UK specifically the radical reform (read destruction) of council housing by the Thatcher government had a large impact on the housing market in the 1980s.
In 1970 you could basically buy any non-city plot of land and build a shack on it without anyone bothering you. Think of the back to the land hippies in California just chopping down trees and starting their little communes -- they'd be utterly fucked if they did that now, some Karen would rat them out instantly to planning and zoning committee.
In the late 60s/70s DIY builders were almost completely displaced by developers who lobbied for regulations that stomped out "a guy and his pickup truck" by and large almost anywhere with desirable land. Then the owners of those houses reinforced same to prop up their property values.
I live in one of the last remaining counties that didn't do that, and last year I built a house for $60k. Pretty easy if you're in a place with essentially no codes or zoning. My (fairly) newlywed and I built the house with basically no experience either.
And in turn none of the discussion you've replied to is relevant by your standard, because the OG article discusses the United States.
Funny someone else is allowed to discuss UK in regards to an American article, but I'm not allowed to discuss America on a UK thread about an American article.
The discussion was prompted by an article on sharehouses being banned in US cities, which prompted comparison to HMOs in the UK. One of those comparisons suggested that HMOs are a recent phenomenon and are a cause in the shortage of family homes in the UK. I replied to this by arguing that a shortage of family homes was also present in the 1970s, and that overcrowded housing for working families has been common throughout British history. You've replied to this with your personal experiences about building a home in the 1970s and dealing with building regulations.
The discussion about the effects of UK HMOs on wider housing availability is indeed a peripheral discussion of limited interest to most. Your comment, while of interest to me, was only tangentially related to my comment. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't have written it - as I said, I found it interesting - I'm just pointing out that it doesn't flow well from what came before it.
Housing in UK/US seems to suffer from simultaneous under-and over- regulation. We over-regulate urban infill housing, and over-regulate the types of housing you can build. We under-regulate landowner profits by letting them keep land rents.
A holistic fix would address both causes of failure in the housing market.
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.
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.
>> 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
This isn't correct. When a house is split into multiple flats, they're individual flats rented out under separate agreements and not a HMO.
A HMO is when that house is rented to a group of people who are unrelated to each other (i.e. not of the same 'household'). They are generally jointly and severally liable (under an AST). They each have a bedroom and share kitchen/bathroom/common areas. HMO's have stricter health & safety regulations. For example, doors must be the automatically closing fire doors that you get in public buildings.
In about 18 years in HMO's I've only had one occasion where the rooms were let separately (in that case they were all being let separately from the start). Most of the time you move in and join an existing lease where the leaving tenant is removed and you are added alongside the other tenants.
I think it probably depends on how the initial people moved in. If the estate agent is renting the rooms individually from the beginning it'll be separate agreements. If it's initially rented to a group of friends it's likely a joint AST and then re-assigned over the years as individuals change and the lease is renewed until you have a bunch of strangers jointly and severally liable (not a great idea).
Maybe this is a 'where you live' sort of thing then... I've never been based in London and when I was HMO-ing it was typically stuff on Spareroom which was always individual lets per room pretty much in the areas I lived at least (probably less competitive than London)
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?
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.
> Living in shared flats is very common in Germany presumably most of Europe.
It's common in the United States, too.
This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.
Any college town will have houses full of college students. In my experience, the only enforcement actions were when landlords were renting out houses to more people than they had rooms, so they had situations where one person was living in a closet or an attic or other space that doesn't have proper fire egress. They don't mess around with that once it's discovered.
> This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.
Let me introduce to the concept of rubber laws, a beloved tool of every totalitarian states. I now pass over to GPT:
“Rubber laws are vague catch-all offenses—like old vagrancy or ‘disorderly conduct’ laws on steroids. Because they’re so unclear, authorities can always say you broke one, and they use that flexibility to target inconvenient people. In the U.S., the Supreme Court generally strikes down such vague laws under the void-for-vagueness doctrine—but authoritarian systems keep them precisely because vagueness makes selective enforcement easy.”
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.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
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.
Oh, no, I totally agree with you. What I meant is that there are people in the UK at least that think that we should restrict the ability to have these HMOs and that they don't want further construction, at least of certain types. You see it all the time in the news media here - they'll interview someone complaining about rent, suggest that rent controls should be imposed, but also that they don't want the new development down the road because it's "luxury flats" and they can't afford those either. "Luxury flat" these days means a two bedroom apartment which 20 years ago would have been considered small.
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/
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
The UK is pretty good at maintaining proportionality between regulation and what's being regulated. Given the nature of housing stock in the UK, it's unlikely that four people in an HMO will be overcrowded, but accommodating more people often requires alterations to the house.
Not sure I totally agree. You can still have say two unrelated people sharing a room (x2). So for example a 1 bed flat with 2 people in the living room and 2 people in the bedroom; or a Studio flat with all 4 people in one room. I see where it comes from though, and I guess including them in the definition but not licensing allows them to magically decide to licence 3-4 HMOs on very short notice.
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?
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.
I've rented an "extra room" a couple times. My partner and I had rent control on our 1BR apartment, but we wanted extra space. It was cheaper to rent a non-bedroom room in a nearby house, than to lose rent control and upgrade to a 2BR.
I think the benefit is significant. Based on my vivid memories of having roommates, not sharing cooking facilities and having guaranteed quiet and privacy in the evenings are pretty huge. Also having to share space in the bathroom with another person's toiletries, towels, and mess. People forgo lots of income in order to avoid living with roommates because of these issues, so I think it's plausible that they would compromise and accept less income to avoid the worst aspects of having a roommate.
Interesting! I guess it depends on the person. I can see your perspective but for me having someone there part of the time would just be an inconvenience without the benefit of cooking together or socialising together. You're offering the lower risk option (in terms of the potential of getting a bad roommate) so while that probably works for some people most of the ads I see for roommates are looking someone to spend some time with too.
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.
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.
I can understand why they wouldn't cut you a deal. It would be virtually impossible for them to rent that space the other 16 hours a day. They want to capture its full value.
It's like being surprised that the car salesman doesn't want to take you up on your offer of paying substantially less to just buy the back half of the car.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The landlord believes that their property and their relationships with the neighbours of the property will be less likely to destroyed by letting the property to older/respected/settled down members of society. Common practice in most of UK as well.
The whole rental law is utterly fucked in the Netherlands, and the Dutch keep solving the issue of too many rules in typical Dutch fashion - by adding even more rules. The end result is that you have a huge number of people paying significantly below the market rate, which is great for them, but if you want a new contract, the answer is "nope, go be poor somewhere else".
>> 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.
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…)
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.
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.
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.
It happens informally everywhere. People will let friends or family move in and split the rent. In many places the landlord is never around and nobody is watching the property so they get away with it.
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.
>In practice I think it's about impossible to enforce. Code enforcement or police would need a warrant to enter
If they have a suspicion and they feel inclined to go after you they'll just go hard enforcing all manner of other shit they don't need to go inside to enforce agains the landlord. It doesn't matter that the things they're trying to enforce may very well be bullshit that couldn't stand in court if challenged, it's cheaper to comply than to fight it.
Code enforcement and other civil and administrative areas of law where the .gov can issue fines on the same order or larger than many criminal penalties while giving the accused none of the rights of criminal trial are a massive, massive, massive, I can't say it enough, massive, end run around constitutional rights.
I don't doubt it happens, just personally going off of what I discovered when perusing the public records in my county. There were a bunch of properties that had a bunch of code complaints followed by inspector noting (paraphrasing) "arrived, gates locked, no one let me in, cannot see from road, case closed as unable to substantiate."
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.
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
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.
> 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”.
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.
I appreciate not being defeatist just because people might be homeless because of drugs or mental issues. I agree that there is a good chance they might destroy a room but I think SROs as a step up from shelters would be respected by like 80% of the people in that situation at that point you can start to price in and adjust the costs of things. Common area's can be managed reducing the overall risk not to zero but even in full appartements you can get really bad tenants that can pay.
My uncle once had a tenant smear feces on the wall before leaving it was nasty but that person was homeless and I don't think think that had mental illness beyond having a break down. I think they lost there job and it was a hard time for them. Still the wall was nasty.
Ultimately SROs do not solve homelessness hence the mitigating it factor if it solves 30% of the homeless problem that would be amazing
My town has built several "transition" apartment buildings for the homeless to give them a "stable" place to live while they in theory get their lives together. They quickly became shitholes, residents destroyed the apartments and especially the common areas/hallways/elevators. They also let any number of acquaintances into the buildings and the apartments, further contributing to the destruction. Half the units are uninhabitable as a result.
If they had to pay rent they would at least be filtering for people who have enough stability/responsibility to have some kind of job or income.
"Just give them housing" does not work for people who have no idea how or desire to live in a house.
Living/loitering/begging/shitting on the streets should not be permitted. Institutionalization may be needed if addictions or severe mental health issues are involved. But expectations need to be higher. Sympathy for and tolerance of antisocial behavior have been utter failures.
The thing with a boarding house is it's not targeted specifically at people who are currently homeless. It's just for anyone who wants to save money on housing. Maybe people who just moved to a new city and haven't found a place to live yet, or people who are just starting out and not making much money. It gives them a place to live before they become homeless.
It would also usually have the landlord living there, and they would be invested in the place because it's their source of income, so they aren't going to tolerate people smearing crap all over the walls or tearing out the wiring to sell for drugs or ranting and raving all night long.
Instituions are full of terrible abuse. Freezing to death on the streets is better than institutions - that is how bad instituions end up being in practice.
It seems there has to be some amount of institutional supervision that would make them at least not as bad as freezing to death in the streets.
But one of the big problems is that almost all of them forbid drugs, the very high they want, so they're a non-starter.
You probably need something like "drug towns" in the California desert that provide comfortable places to overdose to death. Good luck running on that!
Imagine someone running on a long conveyor belt. The belt is just fast enough that they can keep up with it, but any small mistake, hesitation, or fall means they are dragged behind. On that conveyor belt falling behind is the default state. To stay in one place one must do the right things at all times and also be lucky enough that no bad things happen to you.
This is the experience of many. The speed of the conveyor belt is why people can easily imagine falling behind (thats the diffult state!) while moving ahead is almost impossible. (It doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. From time to time someone finds a jetpack and propels themselves onto places where the conveyor belt is working slightly differently, but thats not going to be the experience of everyone.)
In reality, you choose the speed of the conveyor belt. You choose what expenses you take on and therefore how much you need to make each month. To a large part, you can slow the belt down if you like. Options like boarding houses would allow people to slow it down even more precisely if they wanted without falling off entirely.
> To stay in one place one must do the right things at all times and also be lucky enough that no bad things happen to you.
"do the right things" is really not that hard. It mostly involves not doing things like getting arrested, getting addicted to drugs, or otherwise making bad choices. It's not some crazy delicate balancing act that you're making it out to be.
It's an almost immutable part of human nature to get into a position where you're "just getting by" - but if there's someone out there in a similar situation making less than you, you could match them dollar for dollar and have some to save.
Which means that for many it's not a financial problem, it's a self-control problem.
I can't afford to save, but I can afford to pay 10-20% extra on everything through credit cards.
Yes for a reason, perhaps we got the regulations wrong and they need to be looked at. I don't think its an economic non-starter just a complex issue. SROs existed before precisely because they were economically viable. Ultimately we need to reform zoning (in the US) significantly because it has major issues related to local power having inverted incentives to solving zoning and housing concerns at the state level
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Living with roommates is not the same thing as an SRO. While both meet the strict definition of "living with roommates", one of these situations you get pick who you live with (or at least ideologically aligned), in the other you don't.
> 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?
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.
You see, the only reason people are homless or otherwise down on their luck is because we make it so darned comfortable for them. If we can just make it sufficiently unpleasant, then they'll stop doing it.
It is coming from me. It is a sentiment I see a lot of people sincerely espousing, unfortunately. (It's not stated quite so blatantly, but not far off.)
Addiction requires some level of coercive intervention to address. No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
Or just binge watch soft white underbelly on youtube[1].
Mark followed a bunch of homeless people in Skid Row as well as providing assistance to them and documenting it all through interviews.
The problem is so much (soooo much) deeper and worse than the surface level virtuous hand waving of "Just give them food and shelter and the problem is fixed".
I have family member suffering from extreme mental illness. He is likely on the streets somewhere, we don't know where because we had no choice but to abandon him to save ourselves. United States makes it extremely difficult to force treatment for someone who can't be making these decisions on their own ever. He ended up in this cycle. Mental Health Episode, Drugs, Law Enforcement interactions trying to get drugs (Robbing people), some minor help, slightly better, stops medications because side effects, repeat.
Funding it is always crazy expensive and in United States with crappy social safety net, it's really hard to find funding and politically, people don't want to fund it because "I'm barely affording rent and you want to raise my taxes to pay for them? Hell no."
I'm guessing both. I think a lot of people get the ick about forcibly incarcerating people who are addicts or suffering from severe mental health issues[1]. I know I did when I was younger. We've moved to a more voluntary model of "mental health outreach" and the like. But this requires folks with compromised thought processes to regularly make a rational decision to seek help.
There's a huge difference between "suffering from severe mental issues" (which is very hard to establish an objective standard for) and engaging in outright anti-social, criminal behavior. The latter can most certainly result in incarceration or court-ordered treatment, and no one sensible will "get the ick" about that.
There is also deindividuation which occurs in homelessness. You are rarely referred to by your own name and ignored or practically invisible by everyone else except by those providing services. I was homeless for 6 years so this was apparent in a lot of that society. In red states there was a third cohort: those disowned by families for having a differing view than them so they got kicked out. It takes a minimum of one year to recover from the effects of homelessness, mentally. That process only begins after they are rehoused.
> No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
That is correct, yet at the same time: Society as a whole refuses to give these people even the kindness of a roof over their head.
They need better care, yes. But if people won't even agree that these people shouldn't freeze to death in winter (or overheat in summer), talk of funding better care is off the table.
Christ, Fox News had one of their guys outright suggest they be euthanized. The bar for discourse on homelessness is in hell right now.
> The homelessness response system added 60,143 shelter beds in 2024, but with over 600,000 people entering homelessness for the first time each year, this is deeply inadequate.
> In 61 percent of states and territories, growth in demand outpaced growth in available beds, meaning that they had less capacity to shelter people in 2024 than in 2023.
Well there's your answer right there. Communal living is discouraged because our capitalist society uses the fear of homelessness to force people onto the work treadmill. Either join the rat race or it's the streets for you. And now living rough is being made illegal as well, so it's labor camps.
There are many communes you can join, especially on the west coast, and it is usually free to join and free to live there. However you definitely need to work all day (doing mostly manual labor) at those too.
I am not aware of any viable life option that doesn't involve the need to work a lot. Besides being born into a trust fund or being content with homelessness.
There are probably some benevolent communes, although I'd certainly be wary of investing much in building up "free" commune land knowing that you're basically acting on faith the owner doesn't simply declare everything you've built is "the peoples" and then use his position as glorious leader to lord it over you.
Based on how much people pay for even absolute shithole desert wasteland where I live, I can tell you there'd be a huge demand for homesteading federal BLM or other land if they'd reopen it. It would definitely help people who can't afford to get land on their own.
> capitalist society uses the fear of homelessness to force people onto the work treadmill
If we were living in pre-agrarian society you would either be on the "work treadmill" building/maintaining shelter and finding food or you would starve or freeze to death. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Do you think animals spend most of their time looking for food because they're also operating under the capitalist system?
> If we were living in pre-agrarian society you would either be on the "work treadmill" building/maintaining shelter and finding food or you would starve or freeze to death.
It is my understanding that anthropology has shown that the people of prehistoric times cared for their sick, elderly, and infirm.
> "From the very earliest times, we can see evidence that people who were unable to function were helped, looked after and given what care was available."
These were almost certainly family members, not strangers. Obviously you would care after your child/father/grandmother if they were infirm regardless of economic system. And even that is far from universal. Indigenous Amazon societies still practice infanticide[1] in times of scarcity or for infants that are infirm.
This phrase is doing so much heavy lifting as to actively mislead people (i.e. lie with plausible deniability).
Take a subsistence farming community for example. If there aren't enough calories in the stockpile to feed everyone over the winter deficit they're gonna realize this in the fall and the less productive people will get their food rationed first and hardest and odds are some of the old (so like 50s) or otherwise infirm people who are in this huge calorie deficit are gonna keel over from a minor cold or something during the winter. The calorie math is what is and no amount of "well they cared for the elderly when times were good" misdirection is going to change the raw math of how frequently times were bad and the number of elderly, infirm, etc, that a society routinely subject to those sorts of "purge lite" events is going to be carrying at any one time.
I 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.
If she only doubled her money in 30 years, that’s only 2.3% CAGR, probably less than general inflation over that time period. Most housing, especially in wealthy areas, has appreciated significantly more rapidly.
I don't disagree but when my father passed, she took out some equity to pay his medical bills as well when she inherited the house. Life has a way of getting in the way.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
The article doesn't make this clear... is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?
Immediately post-college, I shared houses with other 20-somethings. It was always a single lease - 4 roommates listed, 4 beds, all of us responsible for the full amount of the rent. But, we were absolutely allowed to reside in the same home. Same thing in college - single lease for four people in a four bedroom apartment.
Edit - post college was Northern VA (DC Metro). College was UVA, Charlottesville, VA.
Edit 2 - partially answering my own question... For Fairfax Co, VA... Can a home or dwelling unit have multiple renters? Generally, no more than one family, plus two renters, may live together as a single household. Or, no more than four unrelated people may live in one house as a single household. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/code/multiple-occupancymultipl...
All my past rentals were 4 people, so within the limit. And given the size of most homes (4 bedroom is typical), doesn't seem totally unreasonable (ADUs and "granny flats" count as separate homes, so not covered by the 4 person rule).
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.
These are challenges for people sharing housing, but they're not the legal reason why letting out rooms is illegal. Prohibitions on multifamily housing are all rooted in racial animus. It's the entire reason we have single-family zoning (a related legal proscription), which emerged very shortly after the Buchanan v Warley decision that outlawed outright racial zoning. There's a long and well-documented history of this, all the way down to regulations targeting multi-generational households (Black and Latino families are more likely to have a grandparent or aunt living alongside a younger family).
"The Color of Law" is a good starter read here.
>There's a long and well-documented history of this, all the way down to regulations targeting multi-generational households (Black and Latino families are more likely to have a grandparent or aunt living alongside a younger family).
That really doesn't track with the laws actually written. Every single city I've lived in with restrictions on number of unrelated tenants, simultaneously has an exception that there are no limits on related parties, whether through blood or marriage.
They are very much limiting the number of unrelated people in a single dwelling and it's targeting slumlords, not the renters.
He didn't say all prohibitions rooted in racial animus targeted multi generational households. I knew a city where people said they supported unrelated tenant restrictions because they didn't want migrant workers living in their neighborhoods.
Secondary suites are desirable for multi generational households. They are or were banned in many places.
The cities where you lived allowed any number of related people in a 1 bedroom apartment? A 2 person per bedroom limit seems common. Related or not. And prohibition of a child sharing the bedroom of an adult or a different sex child or a different gender child.
> it's targeting slumlords, not the renters.
That's the stated reason. The real reason is of course to target the renters who cannot afford anything else.
Or they're targeting polyamory.
tptacek nailed it with regards to it being historically racial, but I've also seen, to your point, animosity towards anything that isn't a "traditional" or nuclear family. Fear of the different and unknown is a powerful motivator of the people who bring these complaints. Also animosity towards poverty and the belief or perception of material increases in crime and/or traffic.
(property owner, many units, yimby, have to interface with the citizenry at zoning meetings, etc)
I'm sure in some/many cases there were racial motivations but also SROs that have many unrelated people in individual rooms often become seen as flophouses and are seen as undesirable by other property owners. So they are often prohibited at least in single-family zoned areas.
Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.
(as someone who has acquired lots, rezoned, and have contracted to have multifamily built in such areas)
I do agree that one contributor to the housing crisis in many areas is the lack of SRO and boarding houses, which used to be much more common at least in urban areas. Those are all largely gone now, and they used to be common entry-level housing options for young singles.
If I owned a house would I object to the neighbor taking in a boarder or two? No, but I could see being unhappy about them moving out and turning the house into an SRO rental, especially if those tenants created a nuisance in the neighborhood. Same as a problematic Air BnB.
I think a good compromise might be allowing SRO/boarding if the owner also lives in the house. That is what my town is discussing for at least some residential neighborhoods.
SROs should also be more often allowed in already multifamily/high density residental areas.
> Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.
Property owners are absolutely entitled to their property but that also includes things like noise, sanitation, and crime. It's called an HOA or a master planned community and approximately 30% of the US population lives in one.
Few people like HOAs but still engage in them despite all the downsides because they specifically don't want to live in high density housing where people are packing 10 or 15 unrelated people to a house, inviting crime, noise, sanitary issues, and all the other negatives of high density housing.
Most people who engage in a HOA do so because existing regulation requires newly developed subdivisions to create their own local government to do the work of providing streets, etc, that should be done by the existing city government.
it's called an HOA or a master planned community and its a voluntary agreement between homeowners, not something any one homeowner is entitled to over the protestations of others. People who want to join an HOA are entitled to do that, and people who don't are entitled to not, but that's different from the law because the law is not optional or voluntary. It is, by its very nature, a restriction on the liberties of people without their express consent. What you're talking about is very, very different and deserves to be discussed independently of this.
Property owners absolutely are entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density, and I say this as someone who also has done similar work to you.
If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
>If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.
>If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
Indeed, they want the authority over the land without buying or otherwise having to expend finances to control the land.
That's not what I'm talking about at all. Zoning regulations should reflect the desires of a community, and there's no inherent reason they can't be more restrictive than yimbys would like.
This is just a tragedy of the commons situation.
Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them. They naturally want to pull the ladder up.
But if you just let them, then there's 0 new homes being built in the US. And then the economy implodes.
We have to toe a line necessarily. If you just allow the tragedy of the commons to happen 100%, then everyone loses. Everyone, including those who benefit.
Its like feudalism. Feudalism seems like a fantastic idea if you're a feudal lord. But... Its actually not. No, you lose too.
Imagine how much richer those feudal lords could have been had they not impeded the progress of Europe for hundreds of years.
> Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them.
Upzoning actually increases land values, because it gives you the option to develop your land into a higher-productivity use (and hence higher potential rents).
NIMBYs in my observation tend to be anti-change; they bought with the neighbourhood a particular way and want it to stay that way. Upzoning brings in a change in the vibe and demographic that they don't want.
Exactly. Most people don't buy a home with the hope that the surroundings will change drastically. And of course is there is a change for the better, the same people who complain about about NIMBYs will complain about gentrification.
> Zoning regulations should reflect the desires of a community
The community can express its desires by building whatever kind of housing they want on their property. What you're talking about is my property having to reflect the desires of the rest of the community.
No, the existing community made decisions that already exist.
Potential new residents should have no say, and actual new residents knew what they were before they purchased the property.
Severely limiting the property rights of anyone owning land there doesn’t necessarily seem reasonable
It's not a severe limitation to tell someone that everyone who lives in an area agreed to something that they'll have to adhere to if they want to live there also.
It obvious is. I’am not saying whether collectivism is good or bad, though.
you used the word "entitled" though, and that has a specific meaning. why would nimbys be "entitled" to stop high density housing but yimbys not be "entitled" to do it? this contradiction resolves itself very neatly in a system where yimbys get to do what they want with their property and nimbys get to do what they want with theirs. It only gets complex when one person wants complete control of their property and also partial control over someone else's, and they dress up their own personal best interest as "the desires of the community".
Because "yimby"s go to higher government to force localities to adopt rules they vote against, i.e. they get their way with authoritarian policies that apply outside of "their backyard". Some even think there should be national laws! They want their policies applied to essentially an entire continent. Nimbys typically don't care about things that are not part of their locality. San Francisco wants giant skyscrapers? Cool, none in my city, thanks. That's why we chose to live in an area that bans high density.
From what I've seen the actual policies being pushed by "yimbys" seem much closer to yiyby.
> Nimbys typically don't care about things that are not part of their locality
Yimbys go even smaller. They don't care about things that are not in their backyard.
You want an apartment building on your land? Cool, none on my land thanks.
If you care about freedom, go with yimbys. The nimbys are the ones putting encumbrances on your property.
Obviously I don't care about that freedom. Just like I don't care about the freedom to put up ugly billboards on your land. That's why we bought a home in an area that bans those things. It also requires ugly parking lots to be set back behind a tree line, and new residential developments must have bike trails that connect to the wider network. I'm happy for you to live somewhere where you have that freedom though. I know "no rules" appeals to some!
So you don't care about other people's freedoms but yimbys are bad because they're "authoritarian". Got it, totally cool, logical, and consistent.
You could just be honest and say "I want to use government power to suit my needs, even if it costs other people. But no one else can do that". It's pretty selfish but at least we'll know where you stand.
Yeah that's why I moved somewhere where those were the agreed local regulations and everyone else was on the same page. That's why local governance is good. Everyone can find somewhere where they can be happy.
> everyone else was on the same page
You can't know that though. Unless you hold a referendum to renew the rules every year and they pass by a 100% majority.
The only honest way to do it is without invoking government power. Move to a gated community. Have a neighborhood association, funded solely by residents, whose bylaws require that it gets to have any property up for sale in the community as long as it matches any other accepted offer on it.
If you want your "dream community" spend your own money. Don't go into other people's pockets.
I don't subscribe to pure anarchism. We also have local public schools, parks, libraries, bike trails, etc. funded by "other people's" (our) pockets. It's fine. The US at least has 10 million sq km. Plenty of room for different types of communities to exist. The are cities in multiple directions a few miles away with less restrictive zoning if people like the area but want apartments, townhomes, or advertising.
And this is because individual property rights must not be sacrosanct in a civilized society.
We already have a number of rules of what you can and can't do with your private property that I think most people agree on. You can't build a slaughterhouse right in the middle of a residential area. You can't dump your garbage into the water flowing through your property. Etc.
Those are rules we all agree on because they have immediate and very visible primary effects.
The things we're talking about now are less visible secondary effects, but they're still very real.
The ability of our entire society to be able to securely and affordably house all its members is a much stronger imperative than the ability of people in any particular area to have nice views, or neighbors who all share the same socioeconomic class/skin color/native language as them.
We should probably try to keep them to a minimum though, lest we stifle innovation. You wouldn't want to stifle innovation, would you? Or inadvertently destroy shareholder value?
There are all kinds of desires local communities might have that are proscribed by state law. Why should this one be different? If you don't want those laws passed, organize for a candidate who will oppose them. If the state goes the other way on a land-use issue within that state, it's hard for me to see why there's some moral mandate that local NIMBYs be allowed to overrule them.
The whole theoretical conception of property rights is that a property right is the right to control what happens on your property, which implies you don't have the right to control what happens on other people's property, because that right belongs to other people. You can't eat your cake and have it.
If you want property to be a neighbourhood thing then you should also be required to let the benefits of your own property accrue to your whole neighbourhood and not just yourself. So no tall fences for example. How come everyone else should have to do what you want, but you shouldn't have to do what everyone else wants?
My neighborhood does in fact ban any kind of front yard fence, and I'd have to check but the only backyard fences I recall seeing are those around pools, which are legally required for child safety reasons.
> The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.
Of course.
> Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.
Pro-housing people in my area absolutely are trying to force people to do things with their property and in their neighborhood by barring covenants and other restrictions that can be put in place by municipalities and HOAs.
Barring restrictions is absolutely not “forcing” anyone to do anything. Take away all restrictions on my lot and I am still not forced to develop on it.
A law negating a covenant everyone entered into willingly and freely does kinda alter the deal after its made. I do wholeheartedly agree that removing zoning restrictions doesn't impinge on anyone's liberty though.
> and freely
If that was the case i.e. nobody wanted to build anything new on their land why would the “convenant” be necessary. Or is the idea that former owners can impose these decisions they made on anyone they sell the property to?
We allow all sorts of encumbrances to transfer with property. You can sell a house with an easement that lets neighbors use some amount of your property for access, with a tenant who has a contractual right to stay to the end of a lease regardless of what the new owner wants, or with a covenant to limit development. Hell, a couple years back an entire mall sold for $20 with the agreement that the buyer was assuming all of the seller's debt and also the seller's contractual obligation to perform road maintenance. If you couldn't transfer these agreements with a sale they'd be useless even absent a sale. Either no one would buy the property because its unsellable and the value would plummet or you would buy it with the encumbrances, transfer ownership from your left hand to your right hand to remove them and then do what you want.
Covenants are already heavily regulated and have a pretty icky history in the US.
Let me know your address so I can buy the adjacent properties and force you to live next to a landfill or move away from your now-worthless home.
It may surprise you but I’m not actually scared of that happening. I’m actually zoned for the house next door to me to turn into a seven story building, which many in my city think is horrifying, but I’m not scared of that either.
If you legitimately would have no issues being surrounded by a landfill, you're such an outlier that your opinion is basically meaningless.
Honestly the biggest reason I became a pro-density advocate is because low-density communities are almost always tax-revenue-negative[1], given that the cost of things like roads, water and sewer infrastructure scale with land area. What NIMBYs often seem to want are the amenities of city living (like a sewer instead of a septic tank in your yard) without the people, and that just doesn’t work.
[1]: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI
The suburbs I've lived in have spent far more on things that scale with population (primarily education) than things that scale with area. You also can't split revenue from downtown commercial areas out from surrounding residential like that. Are businesses "subsidizing" residents? Of course not. That doesn't even make sense as a question.
Posting a video from a highly biased source is not very convincing.
Almost every household with a child is tax revenue negative, and I don't think you're suggesting we reform education funding to correct that.
Look, the people making this argument all come from a fairly aligned political unit. If you start hearing this perspective from a broad coalition of ideologically diverse groups, it would mean the thesis has become consensus. I agree with you that the guy's tone is not great, so here's a slightly different framing: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/4/17/sprawl-is-... (strong towns' emphasis is on ending federal infrastructure loans that leave cities and suburbs with infrastructure they don't have the tax base to maintain over a generation. Which I think leads to similar conclusions but they're careful not to say that).
Their framing also highlights the important financial difference between children and sewers, though: the former get less expensive and more productive over time, and the latter do the opposite, which is how the problems happen.
I'm a big fan of StrongTowns and this is the article that NotjustBikes used as a launching point for the specific episode of fuckcars porn that you posted: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017-1-9-the-real-reason...
Fiscal soundness at the local level should not be a political issue, but IMO the progressive left has turned it into one by attacking anyone and everyone who isn't in rigid alignment with every element of their housing agenda, which includes some pretty radical (and largely undesirable) changes for most Americans. And then of course when people balk at these undesirable changes, they're called racist, selfish, or both.
I don't agree that you can really claim one part of town is subsidizing others based on the analysis from firms like urban3. Sure, if you stuck 10 businesses on a plot of land where only 1 exists now and those businesses all thrive, tax revenue would be higher for that plot of land. Is there demand for 10 more businesses in your city or town, times every drive thru fast food joint or Starbucks? Is it actually a problem that businesses are paying more in taxes than they consume in services, which lets residents pay less than they consume? Would those businesses be there if their owners couldn't live in the type of housing they wanted in the city? There are so many intertwined issues that seem impossible to decouple to me, in addition to the obvious issue that the school system is the primary consumer of tax revenue in almost every area and the taxes paid by parents don't come close to covering that expense.
It's also not a coincidence that they picked an economically depressed area with a fairly high crime rate for this analysis. If they looked at a city with residents who made the median household income for the US, or even above it, I suspect you'd see a very different picture (though the larger point is still worth considering and largely valid).
I do agree completely that the federal and state governments are just setting these places up for failure (and future rounds of external funding), but I don't see YIMBYs talking about that. They just seem to be angry that people are living more comfortably than they would like in lower density housing instead of embracing the urban lifestyle they are so passionate about, and want to force everyone to align to their vision not for fiscal stability, but for ideological reasons.
> If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right
This is an opinion, not a right codified in statute, and state laws can be enacted to override local planning ability to prevent upzoning. People who live in their community are entitled to affordable housing (again, my opinion, maybe not yours). Property owners leave, property owners die; the path to success is to simply continue to grind against the nimby machine.
https://www.yimbylaw.org/
I disagree that people are entitled to affordable housing where they desire to live. There are neighborhoods I could not afford to live in, and I am not entitled to live there. I live where I can afford, and this is the case up and down the market. If I want to live in some community, it's up to me to be able to afford it.
That said, if I can afford to buy property and want to build higher-density lower-cost rental housing on it, that should generally be my right as well.
The issue isn't that some communities are expensive. The issue is the deliberate engineering of extra housing expense extrinsic to the market itself using the force of law, which is a capability home rule grants exclusionary communities if not policed carefully.
It's an inherent right, otherwise CA wouldn't have to pass laws to override it (which is an overreach IMO).
No one is entitled to affordable housing in any specific location.
No it isn't.
Well consider me convinced by your thoughtful response!
I guess that overrides centuries of precedent.
There's been centuries of precedent for all sorts of things we'd recoil from now.
A community of SFH residences makes you recoil? You're an extreme minority if so, which makes this no better than your initial statement.
> If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right
I’d be interested as to any country that recognizes this as an explicit right.
Explicit? Probably not. But zoning is handled at the local level traditionally.
> Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.
Of course they're entitled to stop efforts to change the world around them. If you moved into a neighborhood with a minimum lot size was X acres, it's a reasonable expectation that it remains as such. If someone comes along and not only wants to change that, but also build multi unit apartment complexes across the street from you, why should you not have a say? Clearly the person was not allowed to do that before changing the zoning rules so why can't I try to stop them from changing them at all?
There's nothing racist about wanting to live a quiet suburban or rural life where you can neither see nor hear the next house over.
People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change. This is very understandable. Using force of law to maintain aesthetic levels and social class divides is where the perverse incentives set in. The US Supreme Court approved the earliest zoning laws based on health justification. The dicta in the court opinion cited cities as parasitically infringing on bucolic greenery. We now see the logical endpoint of restrictive zoning. Million dollar houses that are mostly the right to live at that address (the structure is small and worn). Landlords having tremendous power over tenants.
>People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change.
Correct, people making what is for most the largest financial investment and commitment of their lives want to have control over what happens to it. When you have a 30 year mortgage on a piece of property that is many times your gross yearly income, you're kind of invested in the most literal sense of the word.
It would be one thing if the re-zoning included an offer to buy or move every house within X distance that has property values and "standard of living" directly affected by the re-zoning. But in almost all cases when the re-zoning occurs, the response is: sucks to be you.
I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the developer will make more money if it's in an already developed area, at the expense of all the existing homeowners.
> There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why?
Because the vision of quarter acre blocks from sea to sea is gut-wrenching and we would prefer to limit the bounds of human building so that some forests and wild lands remain.
>I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not.
I think a large part of the problem is that states and to a lesser degree the feds are trying to compensate for problems created by places like SV (not that every state doesn't have comparable places doing similar) so they write rules that incentivize X or Y and so you wind up with weird "a bunch of duplex townhouses on .2ac" developments in the middle of nowhere and other places they don't make sense because developers are naturally pairing the incentivized types of construction with the cheapest suitable land.
OK, now extend that line of thought just a little bit further.
Why will the developer make more money if it's in an already developed area?
Because that area has better access to shops, schools, and workplaces.
Sure, you could build a giant apartment building out on the edge of town—the land would certainly be cheaper!
But, given how things are today, it's unlikely you'd ever fill it in a way that would recoup your investment. In order to make something like that work, what we'd really need is proper public transport that reliably stopped at (or near) such a development, with well-sited stops in town in order to allow residents to do all the things they need to do. To reach the things that are in the town.
There's nothing intrinsically racist about having lot size preferences, but the lot sizes we have in most 20th century vintage zoning codes are in fact racist by design. Minimum lot sizes were a way of keeping Black families from crossing borders from redlined ghettoes into white neighborhoods or suburbs, by preventing people from subdividing lots into smaller, more affordable houses.
Meanwhile: it's perfectly understandable that people don't want to see change in their neighborhood, or that they buy a property in the expectation that everything good about it will remain. But that's not a reasonable constraint for the law to operate under. You do not in fact have a strict right to control things that happen outside the borders of your own lot.
Some community restrictions are reasonable. We broadly agree that it's not OK for someone to open a tannery in the middle of a suburban residential block. Others are not; for instance, neighbors several blocks over will argue that they have a right not to endure extra traffic when our local hospital, the largest employer and best hospital in the region, plans a small addition.
The most important phenomenon here is hyperlocalism. The immediate neighbors of new proposed residential developments will reliably oppose it. They'll also make up the overwhelming majority of those who show up for public comment, because normal people don't turn out to support new apartment buildings built across town. But if you accept that resistance as a given right, you're essentially saying nothing will ever get built.
The muni I'm in has managed to go from 70,000 residents to 50,000 by consistently applying this strategy, so it's not even accurate to say it's about "change", so much as it is about strangling out as many residents as possible to achieve a targeted demography.
When things are seen as undesirable by property owners and we want to understand why, the reason is almost always racism.
See also: HOAs, school districting, road construction, railroad construction, gentrification...
That's just America.
Sure, but part of the point of in-effect racist zoning policies is that the affected population is predominately the targeted minority. It would be more effective and more equitable to address the actual issues created by flophouses.
Single-family zoned areas by definition only have single-family homes, and only some families will be able to afford those homes. The designers of such policies are often well-aware that the only families affluent enough to purchase or rent a home in such an area is of the preferred race (thanks to the strong racial correlation to socioeconomic class, as well as historic explicit racist policies like redlining, employment and education segregation, etc etc).
To be clear, I don't believe that single-family zoning is necessarily racist, especially with the continued democratization of the middle class. Single-family zoning is bad for a lot of reasons. Its just that it is absolutely the case that historically single family zoning was deliberately used in several cases as a racist policy, but in such a way that it would pass muster in court.
I don't know what the racial origins are, but I have grown skeptical of many racial explanations, because they're often simplistic, speculative, and often lack a comprehension and awareness of the greater social context and events occurring around the middle of the century, like the intentional weaponization of "racism" against ethnic neighborhoods that were not assimilating into the ever-nebulous category of "whiteness". (Mass migration is one classic instrument, as are highways and bad urban planning. In the first case, mass migration from the South was used to break up ethnic neighborhoods in the North, causing their scattering across the suburbs to hasten assimilation. You could have used practically any outside group, but the convenience here was that it exploited the moral high ground of the civil rights movement, allowing opposition to mass migration to be cast as an expression of racism.)
However, ascribing opposition to "fear of the unknown" as a motivator is likewise lazy. It works from the assumption that a) the nuclear family is arbitrary and thus have no presumption in their favor, and b) that there is no tolerance for substitutes for the nuclear family, in the strict sense. It's not like most people are clamoring to live in a polyamorist sex commune, so it's not a good explanation.
The whole race thing is a red herring. Pretty much every "racist" law outside of the former confederacy was written with the Irish in mind and last I checked they were just as white (technically whiter if you want to hair split) as the wasps who championed those laws.
Those people back then were trying use government force to make it harder for people to live in ways they didn't like in the via regulation all the same as people do here and now in 2025. They used race/nationality as a proxy for that insofar as it was an accurate proxy (which is why in the US it largely fell out of favor starting in the 1950s after the culturally flattening effect of the depression + ww2).
Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit, because to take a step back and assess the fundamentals of the sort of rulemaking being advocated for would be detrimental to their cause(s).
Note that the Irish were not considered white throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and into the early 20th century. See eg. "How the Irish became white":
https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Noel-Ignatiev/dp/0...
There were plenty of "NINA" ("No Irish Need Apply") signs throughout the North, the same way we had Jim Crow laws in the South. Other groups too: Poles and Jews were also not considered "white" during this time period, and then gradually assimilated as the nation's racial animus was focused elsewhere. JFK's election as the nation's first Irish-Catholic president was as significant in 1960 as Barack Obama's election as the first Black president in 2008.
Racism as it exists in America is socially constructed, but tribalism is universal. Interestingly different parts of the U.S. have different racial divides, eg. the black/white divide is not nearly so salient on the West Coast, but there is significantly more anti-Mexican racism and economic classism.
Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind. But much of American zoning post-WW2 is a reaction to the Great Migration and concomitant phenomena like redlining, which created new neighborhood and municipal borders that were defended in part by shrink-wrapping inhospitable zoning codes around existing residents.
A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design, but he also traveled the country building these de facto redlining codes all across the continent.
It's not a red herring.
> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
You can just Google this. He's pretty famous!
https://nextstl.com/2021/04/harland-bartholomew-destroyer-of...
>Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind.
And who was the "no mobile homes" addendum written for?
You're using "racist = bad" as an excuse to avoid evaluating the premise of the law, which itself is bad too. It doesn't matter that the law is racist. There are tons and tons of areas in the zoning code that are just as bad because they inherent from the same premise of micromanagement, not being racially motivated doesn't make them good. The whole race thing is a red herring.
This is BS, and race was absolutely part of the equation. The covenants to my parent's house in the SFBAY literally say no black people can live on the property unless they're servants. It's no longer enforceable today, but it absolutely was when their house was newly built.
That is a different point not related.
A black family or single person could not live in that location. We are talking about 4 unrelated people.
One thing you can never depend on racists for is consistency.
There are political cartoons drawn by fascists from the 1920s that attempt to stave off accusations of racism by pointing out that they include Italians (then show Mussolini as a racist caricature of a black man), as if Italians aren't widely considered white.
If you look at how the British and later Americans talked about the Irish "people" or "race", you'll note shocking similarities to how they talked about Africans, Native Americans, Asians of all stripes, etc etc. Explicit skin color rarely came up.
Racism, especially old timey racism, is all about "how do I define my group as 'good' and everybody else as so bad that I can treat them worse?"
Just for curiosity's sake, when you talk about Italians being widely considered white what context is that in? Because you later talk about anti-Irish racism in the US in the 20s and 30s and the experience was pretty similar for Italians in the US in that time period as well. I have living relatives that can give you firsthand accounts of open, organized, violent anti-Italian racism in Pittsburgh pre-mid WWII.
I mean modern day. What I'm trying to express is that "nobody today would be racist against $whateverGroup$!" has precisely zero bearing on what absolute batshit lunacy people were racist about even 50 years ago.
Its also the case that even in the 1920s, while there was a lot of anti-Italian racism, people generally saw that Italian heritage was better than African heritage.
This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism.
> Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit,
You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things, so I'm very confused. Do you somehow think that removing restrictions on unrelated tenancies is going to "micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways "?
>This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism.
Regardless of exactly which laws were passed to make living the "wrong" way hard for which demographics the fact of the matter is that race-baiting is purely a distraction and manipulative debate tactic here. The laws are bad on a fundamental level. To use "law is racist, therefore bad" is to engage in a logical slight of hand to avoid the question "if it's bad for municipalities to regulate in this manner why ought states be allowed to do it". Most local zoning codes, if not evaluated by a judicial system highly biased toward the government, would fail the Penn Central test in many places. Simply porting that level of micromanagement to the state level and then scaling it back from 11 to 7 doesn't make the fundamental premise of what's going on here (the government essentially taking land via regulation, to the detriment of owners and communities in the longer term) any less odious. Yeah, not cranking it to 11 does mostly solve it in the moment, but that's like replacing an bad king with a benevolent one. This just isn't an area the government ought to be regulating to the degree that it is. Yeah there's some extreme examples (toxic waste dumps and whatnot) but neither state nor local nor federal government has any business telling people where they can't put apartments or warehouses or other mild things like that.
These laws are bad because the government has no legitimate authority to micromanage the housing stock (and other things) on the fine grained level it does. The sum total of regulations effectively amount to a taking without compensation. They might also be racist in some cases, but that's on top of an already flawed premise.
>You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things
No, I'm saying this in reply to someone who's pretending to want to deregulate but simply wants to regulate in a different way. It's a more permissive way and an overall improvement but the premise is still flawed. Having state regulation that says municipalities can't zone away X, Y and Z simply moves the bickering over minutia from the town hall to the state legislature. It's like adding more and more rules to a geocentric solar system model. You'll get better and better but it's still not right at its core.
Why are the cities that you happen to have lived in a relevant data set here?
Why aren't they? Because what appears to have been an obvious point to everyone else isn't you you:
My point is, across multiple states, and various cities, I've never run across an instance without a family carve-out. I even went through the trouble of picking random large cities throughout the US and literally every one of them has a carve out. Unless you can provide some data otherwise, why is your comment relevant to this discussion? What value were you trying to add?
"Prohibitions on multifamily housing are all rooted in racial animus". That's not true even if part of your statement is true.
Many prohibitions are based on moral reasonings outside of race. You couldn't rent a hotel room in most places if you were not married regardless of race.
So, people were not allowed to have their grandparent live in the same household as the parents? That seems awfully bad for social health.
I’m pretty sure the law has a lot more to do with existing property owners trying to preserve the value of their own property, than it has to do with lobbyists hating Democrat party bloc voters for literally no reason at all.
Though the latter story does get out the ol’ vote. I guess working class people with a mortgage are the Kulaks now.
We're discussing zoning codes that were essentially set in the 1940s and 50s, and have only been incrementally adjusted since then. "Democrat/Republican" wasn't a salient distinction for this issue at the time (and much of the Democratic base had the opposite racial salience.)
> Part of the problem is the law isn't designed for shared housing
That’s part of the problem, but this article is actually about explicit legal limits on sharing, not merely that sharing, where allowed, isn’t always legally convenient.
Forcing things to go through the full ass reaming of the "everything else" process rather than whatever less terrible process was written to make some "supported" thing streamlined enough to not cause uproar.
The purpose of the system is what it does. They don't want to make doing "bad" things easy so they let your only option be through the same absurd catch-all process.
In my experience, it's a lot easier to kick out a roommate than a tenant. If you share a kitchen or a bathroom with somebody, then most tenant protection laws don't apply. Once you share a bathroom or kitchen, then "not getting along" is enough of an excuse for it to become a safety issue.
One interesting thing about roommates is the landlord can't discriminate, but the roommates can discriminate against other roommates on any basis they want if they reside in the same dwelling, at least in the U.S.
even more confusing: landlord occupied housing.
> 2/ From a legal discriminatory standpoint, the law doesn't have much protections for people blocking certain raises or genders from renting.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but why is this a problem? When you're living in such close quarters with people, you should have some freedom in choosing who you're living with. The classic example would be a "female only" household that doesn't allow men for real or perceived safety reasons. There are also cultures/religions where cohabitation with those of the opposite sex is taboo.
The race angle is more thorny, but I'd rather lean in the direction of allowing people to choose who they co-habitate with.
Some freedom? My house is my safe space, it's the place I go when I'm exhausted, when I'm sick, when the rest of the world sucks.
I should have a very high degree of freedom over who is allowed to share that space with me and I shouldn't have to justify not allowing another person (stranger or not) to co-habitate.
If you want that degree of freedom, a boarding house or shared occupancy is not for you. Pay up for dedicated solo housing.
The amount of people in a boarding house or shared occupancy is low enough that they can easily be all mutually trusted friends or acquaintances to one another. Why should people be forced by law to admit strangers that they might not be fully comfortable with into that kind of tightly-knit arrangement?
In a true boarding house, the landlord/owner controls who lives there - each room is rented individually. Individual tenants have zero control over who lives in the next room.
But, yes, if you have a typical shared home, where 4 people get together and rent a home at once, yes, you do have that control (and should have it).
Actually, if they rent the home, then they still don't have that control. The landlord does. S/he is free to put someone you don't like in the upstairs unit. Or even in the 5th bedroom of the house if it's a room letting type situation.
No matter what. You rent? Yeah, sorry. The landlord makes the rules.
The hypothetical foursome would need to purchase their property. At that point, they would be able to control for who could live there.
If a group of tenants and the landlord all sign a "joint and several" lease for a house or multibedroom apartment, nobody can make changes until that lease agreement expires (at least not without the agreement of everyone on the lease).
If it's an SRO lease where they are leasing just a single room and access to common areas then yes the landlord can lease rooms as he can find tenants for them.
Material point is that people are misapprehending the direction of control here.
The tenants have zero control.
The only people allowed to reside at the property, are people the landlord has allowed to do so. Those approved residents are not allowed to then decide to allow different people to reside at the property. Even new tenants sought out in an attempt to sublease, will have to be endorsed by the landlord. Not the current tenants.
People on this thread appear to believe tenants get these rights. No. Tenants get a different set of rights. They can decide who they want to live with. But they cannot decide who they want to live with in a given landlord's house. The landlord gets the right to decide who can reside at the property. Full stop. That the tenants believe X is a great guy is irrelevant to the deliberations of the vast majority of landlords. If you insist on living with X, then you'll have to find another property to rent if X is not agreeable to the landlord.
And the law backs up the landlord's dispassionate disposition on approving residents.
Basically you can choose your roommates, and you are then constrained in the places you're allowed to reside. That constraint being only those places willing to accept all of your roommates.
> Those approved residents are not allowed to then decide to allow different people to reside at the property. Even new tenants sought out in an attempt to sublease, will have to be endorsed by the landlord. Not the current tenants.
Depends on what your lease says. The owner can give that option.
The landlord cannot legally give you the right to weigh in on a separate lease (SRO) if you'll make decisions using a protected class (i.e. you only want a particular sex in the SRO).
Depends on where and local laws. In San Francisco you can swap roommates out one for one and they landlord can not reasonably stop you. They can request an application if they want but they can’t reject them unless they have a very good reason. Most landlords don’t bother to waste their time.
Yeah, you're being way more pedantic than I was a few posts up.
My point was only that in an SRO/boarding house situation, the tenant has no control, and at any given point in time, the tenant in the next room could change.
And in a shared home "joint and several" lease situation, the tenants control who can live in the home at the beginning of the lease (but, yes, they're effectively locked into that arrangement for the duration of the lease).
Yes, in both cases, the landlord generally has more power than the tenants. That wasn't my point.
As a practical matter, the landlord will be happy to lease to any group of people who all want to live with each other and who are financially qualified to pay the rent.
And if the landlord is being selective on the basis of race or other protected class, that's flat-out illegal.
Or just be free to choose your roommates.
> Probably an unpopular opinion, but why is this a problem?
Because it makes it relatively more difficult for minorities to obtain housing, see sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348212
> The classic example would be a "female only" household that doesn't allow men for real or perceived safety reasons. There are also cultures/religions where cohabitation with those of the opposite sex is taboo.
The solution to the “female only” or the religiously observant household is for the renters/buyers to self-select and organize themselves. I don’t see why the landlord/seller needs to mandate it.
The solution to the “female only” or the religiously observant household is for the renters/buyers to self-select and organize themselves. I don’t see why the landlord/seller needs to mandate it.
I think it's because the only two options being presented are a group of people signing one lease with one landlord. Or a group of people individually signing leases with the landlord.
So basically, the problem is for people that can't find a group on their own. Or for a landlord who wants to act like every room is an apartment, when they're clearly not.
You can't find a group of people to share a lease with, but you want to live in a residence which excludes people by race or gender? Sounds like a you problem.
There are a significant amount of people who care about gender such that it makes sense for landlords to discriminate by shared unit. They should have a mix of male only and female only units. (and if they want mix units). In the US not enough people care about the religion of their roommate to be worthwhile trying to find a fair solution to those who care (if you do care you can ask at your church).
It is important to ensure that when you allow such discrimination it is by unit and that landlords not be allowed to discriminate overall
The problem currently isn't the landlords, but the tenants and subtenants. Maybe if landlords could offer more shared housing, this problem would go away. But tenants frequently look for people of the same gender or race to rent a shared housing.
The other (smaller) issue I think is house hackers (landlord occupied properties). The landlord doesn't own multiple units and is effectively "airbnb-ing" out rooms for short term leases.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. The typical roommate situation around here is between two or four in one unit. Maybe it was harder in the days before the internet, but I expect that even then the kinds of tight-knit religious communities that would be opposed to cohabiting outside the faith would have the internal social networking infrastructure to solve this problem.
How does social media solve the issue? I don't think it matters if the landlord or the tenant is advertising sexist/racist housing opportunities, its still sexist and racist, blocking certain groups from accessing housing.
Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.
> How does social media solve the issue?
Huh? Who said anything about social media? Churches and other religious organizations are basically designed to promote and foster these kinds of in-group relationships.
> Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.
It would be very strange to tell someone they can’t decide their own roommate because their selection would be “racist/sexist.” I’m trying to imagine how you would even go about enforcing that at the individual level. Is your plan to assign housing randomly with some centralized lottery system? Extract affadavits from prospective tenants?
Do you believe it’s sexist for a heterosexual woman to use a dating website to look for a husband and not a wife? I don’t see why your logic wouldn’t apply there.
> The solution to the “female only”
Landlords/sellers aren't typically the limiting on gender (because they legally cant), but the renters/buyer's "self-select" process is sexist/racist. People post advertisements on FB looking for a new roommate of certain type.
If anything, landlords in my area subrenting / house hacking are better at managing a home with mixed race / gender than people "self-selecting" with racist/sexist ads.
> is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?
Too many unrelated people living in a housing unit is illegal. Here’s San Francisco’s version of this law which was used to shut down house sharing companies such as HubHaus; see definition of “family” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...
The article also mentioned dormitory-like “group housing” apartments (which differ from housing units in that they don’t have a separate kitchen for each unit). San Francisco is pretty enlightened in that it allows group housing in many zoning districts, but even they have group housing density limits and now common space requirements which are designed to prevent much group housing (see definition of “group housing” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).
Meanwhile, people build tiny homes to "solve homelessness"...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yJsWjulAonc
Why the scare quotes? What else is supposed to be done when every other remedy is either illegal or too expensive!
Typically it’s two per bedroom plus one. The max occupancy is set on the lease.
> The article doesn't make this clear... is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?
A private bedroom but shared living/cooking space is generally called a rooming/boarding house:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house
* https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/mult...
There is a separate contract with each tenant (i.e., multiple contracts), and each tenant is only responsible for paying for their private area.
This differs from a roommate situation in that there is generally one contract with the entire group.
Similarly with subletting: there is one contract with the landlord and the 'main' tenant, and then that tenant then turns around creates separate contract between them and another tenant.
My impression is that boarding house usually includes some services (cleaning, maintenance, food) from the owner or an employee who lives on the premises.
The “board” in a boarding house is food. There can be other services as well, but food is definitely required to be a boarding house.
Yes, the situation with shared common areas and private bedrooms individually leased is more typically called "single room occupancy" (SRO) and is often prohibited by local rental codes.
Where I live there is discussion about allowing it in some neighborhoods, with the requirement that the property owner is also resident in the house.
I'm not an expert on the legal mechanisms but I believe it's a combination of all of those things through a hodgepodge of various local zoning regulations which the article references: limits on the number of unrelated people living in the same home where the limit varies by locality (i've always heard of these as anti-brothel regulations). Limits on number of leases in a single space or requirements for each leasable unit to have its own bathroom and/or kitchen. Requirements that each tenant have their own parking space. Lots of creative ways cooked up by local regulators across the vast USA to discourage anything but single-family homes occupied by single families.
Even what you described (single lease, 4 roommates) is very common and usually allowed but the single lease part is what self-limits the impact of boarding-house type places. You need to find 3 other people to go in on this place with. You need to trust those other people and coordinate lease payments and utility payments and deal with it when some of them to decide to move on. That's a headache!
> or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room
Based on personal experiences I would say that it's only individual leases that are illegal. I lived in an SRO back in college without even realizing it was an SRO, rooms were rented out individually and everyone had a separate lease.
The more common version of this is to just do it privately with your friends or other people that you meet. If that's illegal then that will be news to me and like half my friends that currently live with roommates. Doing it privately raises a number of issues around housing discrimination. A landlord cannot stop you from renting a unit/room but there's nothing stopping a roommate from refusing to sign with you if they don't like some characteristic about you, granted in reality you probably wouldn't want to have that person as a roommate anyways.
Granted there might have been laws in place where I used to rent that capped the number of un-related folks living together but in my experience the landlord never brought it up, likely cause they knew enforcement would just never happen.
I’m not sure what the article is complaining about. I know 2 per bedroom is widely allowed in the US. But more isn’t. It seems like the article is looking to revitalize the concept of a large dormitory where people mostly just come to sleep. Maybe I’m wrong but the article doesn’t do a good job of saying what the problem is.
Either way I don’t think most millennials want more than 2 per room anyway.
> I’m not sure what the article is complaining about.
It's right there in the article:
"And as SROs disappeared, homelessness—which had been rare from at least the end of the Great Depression to the late 1970s—exploded nationwide."
The problem is that there's a "housing crisis" (which really just means that desirable places are more expensive than people would like for the most part, because homelessness is not up significantly since that term became popular to my knowledge) largely created by a lack of new housing starts in those areas, and existing laws bar people from circumventing that with alternative arrangements.
I don't understand why local governments feel like they need to regulate every aspect of a household. Enact laws against the negative externalities that are associated with SRO occupancy if the existing residents want them, and then leave things alone.
It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.
Like I can see why life in a house with 5 people might in some ways be more difficult than life in a house with 4 or 3, but I don't see why it should be illegal. People can think about these things for themselves and decide what works for them.
Sure, most houses won't accommodate 5 roommates, but there also a lot of extremely large houses in this country. Is there any benefit at all to having some weird, arbitrary 4 person cap? Like a cap per area of space might make sense, but just a limit of 4 regardless of anything?
Everything in the US is legally regulated to such an absurd degree. Where I live a gym needs a certain number of parking spaces per square feet. A clothing store needs a different number. A restaurant yet another different number. A business needs to have electrical outlets every so many feet. Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need? No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.
I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom" (because that's super effective).
I agree - I only meant reasonable in relation to typical home sizes.
If there's a grand old 6 bedroom house in a downtown area, it would probably make sense to allow 6 unrelated tenants. My only concern there would be homeowners subdividing rooms ad infinitum to get more tenants. But, there are probably solutions to that that don't involve arbitrary caps on household size.
Sure, like I mentioned in my post above it could be based on square feet. Or the number of toilets. Or bedrooms with windows. Or any number of other things and I would be sympathetic.
It just drives me nuts that the average local politician doesn't seem to care about carefully designing regulations or pruning back the near endless stack of existing, poorly design regulations. We've been stacking stupid on stupid for more than 100 years and it makes doing anything in the real world (building a house, running a local business, etc...) pointlessly tortuous.
Or, you could let people decide how large a bedroom they are willing to rent and stop micromanaging/over-regulating every bit of real estate, which is why the costs are too high.
The original intent of such regulations was not having tenements where people would perish in event of a fire. In 2016 36 people died in the Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.
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.
The electrical outlet requirement is for fire prevention, to reduce the use of long extension cords and people using multi-outlet adaptors.
The parking thing I agree with. If you want to try to run a retail business without parking, good luck but you should not be prohibited from doing it.
Well, I didn't know the origin, that's interesting. I'm still very skeptical of the rule.
There are other fire safety rules in the US that are considered sacred, like residential buildings more than three floors having multiple staircases, but these building codes don't exist in Japan or Europe and fire deaths per capita are just about the same. Meanwhile, it significantly increases the cost of building housing in the US.
I imagine there are lots of places without this socket rule, and if some economist would look at the rates of electrical fires between these places, that would be amazing.
I just hate this pattern of regulation in general. Step 1: identify problem (some building materials can cause cancer). Step 2: Come up with some countermeasure (put a sign on every building saying that the building materials might cause cancer). And then they stop. They forgot step 3! Step 3: Check if your countermeasure actually did anything useful! Did cancer rates go down after prop 65? Yes, but when when you control for smoking rates, no, the effect of prop 65 seems to be nothing.
It might actually do better with less parking... as that can lead to a more pleasurable pedestrian experience. Of course, that requires a certain level of density and proximity to housing (or common/shared parking).
But, generally, parking feels like something "the market" would solve pretty well sans regulation.
> It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.
It's not a set number...Municipalities can set this as low as 2 or as high as whatever.
As to why - go and ask them? Presumably it's what the local voters wanted, or at least the most vocal ones that cared to show up to council meetings and such.
> I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom"
Chesterton's Fence.
> Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need?
The last people I expect to know how much of a resource they need are small business owners. Parking regulations are there when there isn't sufficient street or garage parking. It should be obvious that a restaurant needs more parking spots than say, a dry cleaner, so they shouldn't have the same burden. Parking capacity is inelastic, so if you under build then businesses and traffic suffer. Meanwhile if you overbuild, you're stuck maintaining empty parking lots and have inefficient use of space. It makes a ton of sense to me for this to be tightly regulated.
> No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.
I mean if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers. The outlet stuff comes from building codes like the IBC which is widely used (and as the saying goes, written in blood).
As always when you have a beef with your local government the solution is to get involved instead of complaining on the internet. The barrier to entry is shockingly low.
> if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers
Unfortunately parking mandates and other building regulations are often set directly by politicians. There was some interesting insight into the political input to Seattle’s proposed planning updates last year - https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/16/planners-proposed-big...
> Immediately post-college, I shared houses with other 20-somethings. It was always a single lease
I did this in grad school BUT they were 100% separate leases (in NY state, not the city though). Not sure if the whole thing was just illegal or what TBH but that was the standard for apartments around the university.
> The article doesn't make this clear... is sharing a house illegal
Sharing a house with too many people is illegal in many jurisdictions, yes. E.g., https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/urban-development/sf-housing...
(Note that this focusses on a rule on the number of legally-unrelated people that can legally live in a unit, but it also mentions in passing a separate restriction on the total number of people who can live in a unit irrespective of family relationships.)
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.
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.
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.'
How did you qualify for a mortgage without income?
It was 1991 and we pooled money from 10 people. The house was super cheap ($60k) and in a very depressed area (Attica, Indiana). The seller was a person and not a bank.
Ah thanks. So the mortgage was quite small, still, hard to get one without income. Pooled ownership also makes it much more complicated.
A lot of people have forgotten that between like 2004-2007 you could get a mortgage if you had a pulse.
They made sure to pull that ladder up real good after 08 though.
The problem wasn't sketchy mortgages, it was the borderline fraudulent financial shenanigans after that.
> The problem wasn't sketchy mortgages, it was the borderline fraudulent financial shenanigans after that.
What do you think was funding the sketchy mortgages? The fraudulent financial shenanigans
Insane to be able to buy a house in college - I could barely afford rent in a crappy shared flat
The monthly mortgage payment on a house in many rural areas in the US is far less than shared rent in dense cities.
A friend of mine was making $20 an hour at a part time manufacturing job while he had classes, and full time plus overtime during breaks. It would have been plenty for a down payment on such a house, if he'd wanted to, but he put the money towards tuition to limit school loans instead. This was 20 years ago, give or take, so very much not the norm, but definitely possible.
To add: I think a minimum down payment for the mortgage probably would have been in the $4 or $5,000 range.
If this was pre 2008 you could get a mortgage if you could fog a mirror.
I could've bought a house for $20k a few miles from my school. Rust belt.
Yep this place was around $60k for a big three story victorian in a crappy little town (former rail road hub between Indianapolis in Chicago). 4 big bedrooms, 2 small ones and 3 bathrooms.
Rent back in 1991 in the college town was around $600 per person and up... we made out like bandits but we did have to share cars.
mortgage payments are often cheaper than rent payments
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
> 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.
That's so funny because it would seem that dividers would assist in the supposed disallowed use here...
Wow. I went to college in Utah and had 5 roommates. A total of two rooms. It was a blast.
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.
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.
College living in not comparable to SROs, in part because college kids are privileged, in part because college towns abide, and primarily because they are transient. A tenement full of grown men in SROs is an entirely different beast.
Yes, it is much more directly effective in housing people who would otherwise be homeless.
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.
Voters don't actually want house prices to come down. Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners. Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war. Perhaps because rents are downstream of values, and so it's politically easier for owners to make the correct choices to advance their agenda than it is for renters, which have an extra logical leap required of them.
> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war.
Demographics. Homeowners skew old, which gives them a bunch of advantages in enacting their political power. Higher turnout, baby boom giving them numerical superiority, and the time advantage of being able to enact policy decades ago.
In the US, this is supplemented by matters of race, where because of past redlining policies, "pro-homeowner" policy (esp. suburban single-family-homes) in the last half-century has been a way to primarily benefit white people.
You're forgetting the most important one. Having a bunch of your money tied up in an illiquid asset that is subject to all manner of government micromanagement gives you a huge incentive to see to it that the government doesn't get progressively more shitty toward you than it already is.
Yep, saying it's an age thing is missing that every homeowner is directly financially incentivized to ensure prices go up. I literally get physical printed mail (against my will) every other week telling me about the health of my neighborhood where higher home sale prices means better. Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
> Being older makes a person more likely to be homeowner, they got the causation backwards.
No.
Being a homeowner doesn't grant one political influence. Being old grants one political influence.
It's the correlation of age and homeownership that means homeowners have the political influence the push through policy that drives up real estate prices.
Non-homeowners have political incentives all the same. If only just to oppose those very homeowners' policies. What they lack is the political influence to make it happen.
> Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners
I assure you, a lot of people in the UK want house prices to fall too. There are too many renters who don't want to be renting, and the proportion is increasing. They wish they could buy instead, but can't either because of price, inability to save enough for a down-payment as fast as prices rise (while large rent rises impede their saving or even drain it, and incomes rise more slowly than prices), or inability to obtain a mortgage despite a history of consistently paying more than a mortgage in rent. For the latter category, who can afford a mortgage but can't get one, and are already paying more in rent, their main problem isn't income or price, it's the tighter restrictions on mortgage availability since the 2008 financial crises. But they would still like lower prices.
> Voters don't actually want house prices to come down.
You have this wrong.
> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters
First lets look at homeownership rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S Home ownership is a functionally unmovable number staying around 63%
Home owners are in the majority.
Do you know what one of the biggest predictors of voting is? It is home ownership and local elections with zoning issues (or things that might impact home values) will drive turn out: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-...
Meanwhile to the original article, 80s TV like Golden Girls (shared housing) and Boosom Buddies (boarding houses) are quaint historic notes, the reality is that our use of housing stock has made the problem of where to live worse: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
When you dig down into the data, the article is highlighting a real problem. We have destroyed a lot of historical co-habitation that kept the system working and healthy. We did this with zoning (getting rid of high density to prop up home values) banning types of housing (dense single room, affordable) and making other types impossible (owning a home and renting a room or two, people dont do this because of tenants rights issues).
> Voters don't actually want house prices to come down. >> You have this wrong.
But you don't refute this, if anything you make the case that, since the majority are homeowners, they would of course want ever-increasing home values. And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
> But you don't refute this,
The 66 percent turn out rate is not that high period. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voter-turnou...
If non voting renters showed up, this could easily swing the other way. Renters are (generally) unmotivated to change their destiny at the voting booth.
> And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
This is far far far more complicated than it looks. Because what is inflation vs increase in value after adjustment. There are plenty of places where housing has gone down in value (see Detroit, see Camden NJ). There are plenty of places where gentrification has changed whole regions (see the SF Bay Area).
There has also been a massive change in what we build (smaller homes, vs McMansions).
When you dig into the WHY of this, the destruction of old stock is a huge part of it (see Detroit). Massive changes to what and how we build (back to home owners and zoning) limiting growth in areas. Over regulation (see slow rebuilding in southern CA after fires, and the whole housing shortage here). NOTE: the ADU law that was an attempt to let home owners fix this themselves has been somewhat of a flop... however it is gaining momentum.
The fixes to housing in the US require voters to pass something where only a bit more than half of it would be "good" for them and in a hard to explain way. It is easy to get them to vote such a policy down when the 40 percent that might impact them makes for a clear cut argument for a NO.
Most people in the US live in a home owned by themselves or a member of their immediate family.
On top of that, more of those people vote than the renters in their area.
There's not really much more to it than that.
Somehow? Homeowners are obviously the more powerful group, and real estate ownership in the bigger picture is tied to even more powerful entities (big companies, banks, billionaires).
How many in the top 10% of the wealth distribution do you think are renters? How many in the bottom 20% do you think are homeowners?
In the 1970s, it was usual for working class newlyweds would have to live with their parents until they were able to find housing. That's why second-rate comedians of the time like Les Dawson had so many mother-in-law jokes: there was an awful lot of resentment between young men and their mothers-in-law to exploit. There's nothing new about multiple families crowding into houses designed for just one family in this country - that's why there are so many pubs.
The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been identified as a cause of insufficient housebuilding activity, and new legislation is currently working its way through the House of Lords to alleviate this.
In the UK specifically the radical reform (read destruction) of council housing by the Thatcher government had a large impact on the housing market in the 1980s.
Afaict Housebuilding will not improve based on current legislatory changes, not even close. Until you murder land value capture nothing will change.
In 1970 you could basically buy any non-city plot of land and build a shack on it without anyone bothering you. Think of the back to the land hippies in California just chopping down trees and starting their little communes -- they'd be utterly fucked if they did that now, some Karen would rat them out instantly to planning and zoning committee.
In the late 60s/70s DIY builders were almost completely displaced by developers who lobbied for regulations that stomped out "a guy and his pickup truck" by and large almost anywhere with desirable land. Then the owners of those houses reinforced same to prop up their property values.
I live in one of the last remaining counties that didn't do that, and last year I built a house for $60k. Pretty easy if you're in a place with essentially no codes or zoning. My (fairly) newlywed and I built the house with basically no experience either.
None of this is relevant to the discussion you've replied to, which is about the United Kingdom.
And in turn none of the discussion you've replied to is relevant by your standard, because the OG article discusses the United States.
Funny someone else is allowed to discuss UK in regards to an American article, but I'm not allowed to discuss America on a UK thread about an American article.
The discussion was prompted by an article on sharehouses being banned in US cities, which prompted comparison to HMOs in the UK. One of those comparisons suggested that HMOs are a recent phenomenon and are a cause in the shortage of family homes in the UK. I replied to this by arguing that a shortage of family homes was also present in the 1970s, and that overcrowded housing for working families has been common throughout British history. You've replied to this with your personal experiences about building a home in the 1970s and dealing with building regulations.
The discussion about the effects of UK HMOs on wider housing availability is indeed a peripheral discussion of limited interest to most. Your comment, while of interest to me, was only tangentially related to my comment. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't have written it - as I said, I found it interesting - I'm just pointing out that it doesn't flow well from what came before it.
Apparently there are still some states that are pretty lax, I've heard Wyoming doesn't terribly care much.
But then you're a billion miles from anywhere.
Or fix both.
Housing in UK/US seems to suffer from simultaneous under-and over- regulation. We over-regulate urban infill housing, and over-regulate the types of housing you can build. We under-regulate landowner profits by letting them keep land rents.
A holistic fix would address both causes of failure in the housing market.
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/lo...
> 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.
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.
Because that’s what your source said?
In general I'm happy to debate about facts but I'm not going to engage with someone who makes slimy, low-effort insinuations about motives.
Which high income countries have had high immigration and low housing price increases?
UK's population has gone up 16% since 1980. Average UK home price, adjusted for inflation, has gone up 104% in the same time period.
Inelastic demand has this effect
Only when faced with inelastic supply, which, unlike the demand, is not intrinsically necessary.
>> 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
This isn't correct. When a house is split into multiple flats, they're individual flats rented out under separate agreements and not a HMO.
A HMO is when that house is rented to a group of people who are unrelated to each other (i.e. not of the same 'household'). They are generally jointly and severally liable (under an AST). They each have a bedroom and share kitchen/bathroom/common areas. HMO's have stricter health & safety regulations. For example, doors must be the automatically closing fire doors that you get in public buildings.
> They are generally jointly and severally liable (under an AST).
That’s usually the case for student rentals but largely isn’t the case for professional rentals where each room is let separately
In about 18 years in HMO's I've only had one occasion where the rooms were let separately (in that case they were all being let separately from the start). Most of the time you move in and join an existing lease where the leaving tenant is removed and you are added alongside the other tenants.
I think it probably depends on how the initial people moved in. If the estate agent is renting the rooms individually from the beginning it'll be separate agreements. If it's initially rented to a group of friends it's likely a joint AST and then re-assigned over the years as individuals change and the lease is renewed until you have a bunch of strangers jointly and severally liable (not a great idea).
Maybe this is a 'where you live' sort of thing then... I've never been based in London and when I was HMO-ing it was typically stuff on Spareroom which was always individual lets per room pretty much in the areas I lived at least (probably less competitive than London)
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?
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.
Mass casualty events get a disproportionate amount of attention. Like the 2016 Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.
> Living in shared flats is very common in Germany presumably most of Europe.
It's common in the United States, too.
This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.
Any college town will have houses full of college students. In my experience, the only enforcement actions were when landlords were renting out houses to more people than they had rooms, so they had situations where one person was living in a closet or an attic or other space that doesn't have proper fire egress. They don't mess around with that once it's discovered.
> This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.
Let me introduce to the concept of rubber laws, a beloved tool of every totalitarian states. I now pass over to GPT:
“Rubber laws are vague catch-all offenses—like old vagrancy or ‘disorderly conduct’ laws on steroids. Because they’re so unclear, authorities can always say you broke one, and they use that flexibility to target inconvenient people. In the U.S., the Supreme Court generally strikes down such vague laws under the void-for-vagueness doctrine—but authoritarian systems keep them precisely because vagueness makes selective enforcement easy.”
> I now pass over to GPT
Please don't do this.
Non-attributed data from LLMs (known for bullshitting) is not helpful.
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.
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.
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.
Even where it's not legal, there's often ways around it - if one student is willing to be the "fall guy" so there's only ever one person on the lease.
The SRO bans went explicitly against a form of "hotel" really which was more individualistic.
An example is seen in Blues Brothers, before Carrie Fischer remodels it; probably to install higher density.
Interesting. The Pew Research linked to by the OP has a lot more detail:
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.
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.
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.
Oh, no, I totally agree with you. What I meant is that there are people in the UK at least that think that we should restrict the ability to have these HMOs and that they don't want further construction, at least of certain types. You see it all the time in the news media here - they'll interview someone complaining about rent, suggest that rent controls should be imposed, but also that they don't want the new development down the road because it's "luxury flats" and they can't afford those either. "Luxury flat" these days means a two bedroom apartment which 20 years ago would have been considered small.
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).
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/
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.
True, rooms in London for GBP 1.3k, sharing a house with other 3 or 4 strangers!
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...
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
Well, TIL that 3-4 sharing is a HMO, but doesn't require a licence. That makes no sense..
The UK is pretty good at maintaining proportionality between regulation and what's being regulated. Given the nature of housing stock in the UK, it's unlikely that four people in an HMO will be overcrowded, but accommodating more people often requires alterations to the house.
Not sure I totally agree. You can still have say two unrelated people sharing a room (x2). So for example a 1 bed flat with 2 people in the living room and 2 people in the bedroom; or a Studio flat with all 4 people in one room. I see where it comes from though, and I guess including them in the definition but not licensing allows them to magically decide to licence 3-4 HMOs on very short notice.
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?
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.
I've rented an "extra room" a couple times. My partner and I had rent control on our 1BR apartment, but we wanted extra space. It was cheaper to rent a non-bedroom room in a nearby house, than to lose rent control and upgrade to a 2BR.
Seems like the person renting it out would just be throwing away a large sum of money for very little benefit.
I think the benefit is significant. Based on my vivid memories of having roommates, not sharing cooking facilities and having guaranteed quiet and privacy in the evenings are pretty huge. Also having to share space in the bathroom with another person's toiletries, towels, and mess. People forgo lots of income in order to avoid living with roommates because of these issues, so I think it's plausible that they would compromise and accept less income to avoid the worst aspects of having a roommate.
Interesting! I guess it depends on the person. I can see your perspective but for me having someone there part of the time would just be an inconvenience without the benefit of cooking together or socialising together. You're offering the lower risk option (in terms of the potential of getting a bad roommate) so while that probably works for some people most of the ads I see for roommates are looking someone to spend some time with too.
> having guaranteed quiet and privacy in the evenings are pretty huge.
That's a benefit for other roommates, not the landlord. Unless the roommates are the ones subleasing, which is a lot less common.
There is 0 incentive/benefit for the landlord to accept an uncommon arrangement for less money.
I wasn’t talking to landlords; I was talking to residents whose leases gave them the option to sublease.
Edited to add: I was also possibly talking to residents who were looking to sublease illegally. I didn’t ask.
> 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.
There are tons of roommate situations in Portland for around that price: https://portland.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=700#sea...
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.
I can understand why they wouldn't cut you a deal. It would be virtually impossible for them to rent that space the other 16 hours a day. They want to capture its full value.
It's like being surprised that the car salesman doesn't want to take you up on your offer of paying substantially less to just buy the back half of the car.
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.
I think that statement is true for a lot of middle class people too.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ackchyually… I think this is apocryphal.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brothel-laws-sororities/
Oh man, you're totally right! I never even considered that it was just a college rumor.
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.
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.
> 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.
The landlord believes that their property and their relationships with the neighbours of the property will be less likely to destroyed by letting the property to older/respected/settled down members of society. Common practice in most of UK as well.
The whole rental law is utterly fucked in the Netherlands, and the Dutch keep solving the issue of too many rules in typical Dutch fashion - by adding even more rules. The end result is that you have a huge number of people paying significantly below the market rate, which is great for them, but if you want a new contract, the answer is "nope, go be poor somewhere else".
>> 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.
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…)
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.
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.
They’re (SROs) illegal in every major US city.
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.
It happens informally everywhere. People will let friends or family move in and split the rent. In many places the landlord is never around and nobody is watching the property so they get away with it.
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.
>In practice I think it's about impossible to enforce. Code enforcement or police would need a warrant to enter
If they have a suspicion and they feel inclined to go after you they'll just go hard enforcing all manner of other shit they don't need to go inside to enforce agains the landlord. It doesn't matter that the things they're trying to enforce may very well be bullshit that couldn't stand in court if challenged, it's cheaper to comply than to fight it.
Code enforcement and other civil and administrative areas of law where the .gov can issue fines on the same order or larger than many criminal penalties while giving the accused none of the rights of criminal trial are a massive, massive, massive, I can't say it enough, massive, end run around constitutional rights.
I don't doubt it happens, just personally going off of what I discovered when perusing the public records in my county. There were a bunch of properties that had a bunch of code complaints followed by inspector noting (paraphrasing) "arrived, gates locked, no one let me in, cannot see from road, case closed as unable to substantiate."
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/alexis-osmond
https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_...
This is a prime example of what advocates mean when they say "decriminalize housing".
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
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.
I think it's also correct (and important) to acknowledge the problems that SROs were causing, and why people turned against them in general.
If you refuse to acknowledge the problem, you're doomed to repeat the cycle again when the problems start happening again.
(Many of the problems can be mitigated against if you admit they exist, and work with them.)
> 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”.
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.
I appreciate not being defeatist just because people might be homeless because of drugs or mental issues. I agree that there is a good chance they might destroy a room but I think SROs as a step up from shelters would be respected by like 80% of the people in that situation at that point you can start to price in and adjust the costs of things. Common area's can be managed reducing the overall risk not to zero but even in full appartements you can get really bad tenants that can pay.
My uncle once had a tenant smear feces on the wall before leaving it was nasty but that person was homeless and I don't think think that had mental illness beyond having a break down. I think they lost there job and it was a hard time for them. Still the wall was nasty.
Ultimately SROs do not solve homelessness hence the mitigating it factor if it solves 30% of the homeless problem that would be amazing
My town has built several "transition" apartment buildings for the homeless to give them a "stable" place to live while they in theory get their lives together. They quickly became shitholes, residents destroyed the apartments and especially the common areas/hallways/elevators. They also let any number of acquaintances into the buildings and the apartments, further contributing to the destruction. Half the units are uninhabitable as a result.
If they had to pay rent they would at least be filtering for people who have enough stability/responsibility to have some kind of job or income.
"Just give them housing" does not work for people who have no idea how or desire to live in a house.
Living/loitering/begging/shitting on the streets should not be permitted. Institutionalization may be needed if addictions or severe mental health issues are involved. But expectations need to be higher. Sympathy for and tolerance of antisocial behavior have been utter failures.
The thing with a boarding house is it's not targeted specifically at people who are currently homeless. It's just for anyone who wants to save money on housing. Maybe people who just moved to a new city and haven't found a place to live yet, or people who are just starting out and not making much money. It gives them a place to live before they become homeless.
It would also usually have the landlord living there, and they would be invested in the place because it's their source of income, so they aren't going to tolerate people smearing crap all over the walls or tearing out the wiring to sell for drugs or ranting and raving all night long.
Instituions are full of terrible abuse. Freezing to death on the streets is better than institutions - that is how bad instituions end up being in practice.
I don't have a good answer to the problem.
It seems there has to be some amount of institutional supervision that would make them at least not as bad as freezing to death in the streets.
But one of the big problems is that almost all of them forbid drugs, the very high they want, so they're a non-starter.
You probably need something like "drug towns" in the California desert that provide comfortable places to overdose to death. Good luck running on that!
>People move up and down in economic status all the time.
Entropy. The fact that change happens doesn't prove that we control it.
Your wealth and health are randomized when you're born. What you do later has miniscule influence.
Do you think you could deliberately become poorer if you wanted to? If you do, why do you think you couldn't deliberately become richer?
Imagine someone running on a long conveyor belt. The belt is just fast enough that they can keep up with it, but any small mistake, hesitation, or fall means they are dragged behind. On that conveyor belt falling behind is the default state. To stay in one place one must do the right things at all times and also be lucky enough that no bad things happen to you.
This is the experience of many. The speed of the conveyor belt is why people can easily imagine falling behind (thats the diffult state!) while moving ahead is almost impossible. (It doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. From time to time someone finds a jetpack and propels themselves onto places where the conveyor belt is working slightly differently, but thats not going to be the experience of everyone.)
In reality, you choose the speed of the conveyor belt. You choose what expenses you take on and therefore how much you need to make each month. To a large part, you can slow the belt down if you like. Options like boarding houses would allow people to slow it down even more precisely if they wanted without falling off entirely.
> To stay in one place one must do the right things at all times and also be lucky enough that no bad things happen to you.
"do the right things" is really not that hard. It mostly involves not doing things like getting arrested, getting addicted to drugs, or otherwise making bad choices. It's not some crazy delicate balancing act that you're making it out to be.
It's an almost immutable part of human nature to get into a position where you're "just getting by" - but if there's someone out there in a similar situation making less than you, you could match them dollar for dollar and have some to save.
Which means that for many it's not a financial problem, it's a self-control problem.
I can't afford to save, but I can afford to pay 10-20% extra on everything through credit cards.
>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.
Yes for a reason, perhaps we got the regulations wrong and they need to be looked at. I don't think its an economic non-starter just a complex issue. SROs existed before precisely because they were economically viable. Ultimately we need to reform zoning (in the US) significantly because it has major issues related to local power having inverted incentives to solving zoning and housing concerns at the state level
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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.
The link is basically a comment thread for a report by Pew: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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).
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.
Everyone has a different peeve, and they all conflict. That’s why population density correlates with regulation.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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?
The absolute horror of people using their private property the way they wish without doing you any harm.
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.
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.
I think you hate dogs! Front yards were always a dog toilets, and were always full of shit!
Straw man. You could easily use fire codes, noise ordinances, and other basic measures to rule out the real problems.
> 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.
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.
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.
One example - and very a extreme one to prove a point and not a very compelling one at that.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Renters don't want to live next to a SRO/boarding house either.
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).
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
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.
> demanding every room have a private bathroom
Does this mean in the US apartments have as many bathrooms as bedrooms?
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.
If only we took homelessness as seriously as we took the fear of how people live under a roof....
the lack of flop houses and boarding houses is literally why people are homeless
> 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.
I've heard these referred to as "Brothel Laws".
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Just wait for the City Office of Roommate-By-Another-Name Licensure.
just say they were robbers or squaters who broke in.
City will immidiately drop all charges....!!!
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.
Now ask the same questions about homeless people living in tents down by the river.
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.
The article is about SROs not houses with 12 people.
Ok so we agree there is a valid reason to limit the total number of people who live in a single residence?
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.
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!
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.
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.
I think you just push the problem away, now you got homeless people.
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.
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.
Living with roommates is not the same thing as an SRO. While both meet the strict definition of "living with roommates", one of these situations you get pick who you live with (or at least ideologically aligned), in the other you don't.
Two friends sharing a lovely home is not the same thing as twenty random crackheads living in a trap house.
> 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?
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.
You see, the only reason people are homless or otherwise down on their luck is because we make it so darned comfortable for them. If we can just make it sufficiently unpleasant, then they'll stop doing it.
Is this sarcasm? This reads as incredibly malicious if not
It is coming from me. It is a sentiment I see a lot of people sincerely espousing, unfortunately. (It's not stated quite so blatantly, but not far off.)
Some people are just too lazy to be born in the right circumstances (geography, economy, parentage, skin color, physical ability, etc.) /s
Definitely true in the places with harsh winters.
I think everyone in this thread should read https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...
Addiction requires some level of coercive intervention to address. No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
Or just binge watch soft white underbelly on youtube[1].
Mark followed a bunch of homeless people in Skid Row as well as providing assistance to them and documenting it all through interviews.
The problem is so much (soooo much) deeper and worse than the surface level virtuous hand waving of "Just give them food and shelter and the problem is fixed".
[1]https://www.youtube.com/@SoftWhiteUnderbelly
Is it bleeding hearts preventing this or the unwillingness to properly fund it?
Little of Column A and Little of Column B.
I have family member suffering from extreme mental illness. He is likely on the streets somewhere, we don't know where because we had no choice but to abandon him to save ourselves. United States makes it extremely difficult to force treatment for someone who can't be making these decisions on their own ever. He ended up in this cycle. Mental Health Episode, Drugs, Law Enforcement interactions trying to get drugs (Robbing people), some minor help, slightly better, stops medications because side effects, repeat.
Funding it is always crazy expensive and in United States with crappy social safety net, it's really hard to find funding and politically, people don't want to fund it because "I'm barely affording rent and you want to raise my taxes to pay for them? Hell no."
I'm guessing both. I think a lot of people get the ick about forcibly incarcerating people who are addicts or suffering from severe mental health issues[1]. I know I did when I was younger. We've moved to a more voluntary model of "mental health outreach" and the like. But this requires folks with compromised thought processes to regularly make a rational decision to seek help.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation
There's a huge difference between "suffering from severe mental issues" (which is very hard to establish an objective standard for) and engaging in outright anti-social, criminal behavior. The latter can most certainly result in incarceration or court-ordered treatment, and no one sensible will "get the ick" about that.
There is also deindividuation which occurs in homelessness. You are rarely referred to by your own name and ignored or practically invisible by everyone else except by those providing services. I was homeless for 6 years so this was apparent in a lot of that society. In red states there was a third cohort: those disowned by families for having a differing view than them so they got kicked out. It takes a minimum of one year to recover from the effects of homelessness, mentally. That process only begins after they are rehoused.
> No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
That is correct, yet at the same time: Society as a whole refuses to give these people even the kindness of a roof over their head.
They need better care, yes. But if people won't even agree that these people shouldn't freeze to death in winter (or overheat in summer), talk of funding better care is off the table.
Christ, Fox News had one of their guys outright suggest they be euthanized. The bar for discourse on homelessness is in hell right now.
Housing (or at least shelter) is infact widely available. The problem is that you can't do drugs or drink in these places.
https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
> The homelessness response system added 60,143 shelter beds in 2024, but with over 600,000 people entering homelessness for the first time each year, this is deeply inadequate.
> In 61 percent of states and territories, growth in demand outpaced growth in available beds, meaning that they had less capacity to shelter people in 2024 than in 2023.
Well there's your answer right there. Communal living is discouraged because our capitalist society uses the fear of homelessness to force people onto the work treadmill. Either join the rat race or it's the streets for you. And now living rough is being made illegal as well, so it's labor camps.
There are many communes you can join, especially on the west coast, and it is usually free to join and free to live there. However you definitely need to work all day (doing mostly manual labor) at those too.
I am not aware of any viable life option that doesn't involve the need to work a lot. Besides being born into a trust fund or being content with homelessness.
There are probably some benevolent communes, although I'd certainly be wary of investing much in building up "free" commune land knowing that you're basically acting on faith the owner doesn't simply declare everything you've built is "the peoples" and then use his position as glorious leader to lord it over you.
Based on how much people pay for even absolute shithole desert wasteland where I live, I can tell you there'd be a huge demand for homesteading federal BLM or other land if they'd reopen it. It would definitely help people who can't afford to get land on their own.
> capitalist society uses the fear of homelessness to force people onto the work treadmill
If we were living in pre-agrarian society you would either be on the "work treadmill" building/maintaining shelter and finding food or you would starve or freeze to death. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Do you think animals spend most of their time looking for food because they're also operating under the capitalist system?
> If we were living in pre-agrarian society you would either be on the "work treadmill" building/maintaining shelter and finding food or you would starve or freeze to death.
It is my understanding that anthropology has shown that the people of prehistoric times cared for their sick, elderly, and infirm.
> "From the very earliest times, we can see evidence that people who were unable to function were helped, looked after and given what care was available."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/8788963...
These were almost certainly family members, not strangers. Obviously you would care after your child/father/grandmother if they were infirm regardless of economic system. And even that is far from universal. Indigenous Amazon societies still practice infanticide[1] in times of scarcity or for infants that are infirm.
[1] https://www.scielo.br/j/csp/a/kPn9cHW4RWKz94CjxDBw3ds/?forma...
>what care was available
This phrase is doing so much heavy lifting as to actively mislead people (i.e. lie with plausible deniability).
Take a subsistence farming community for example. If there aren't enough calories in the stockpile to feed everyone over the winter deficit they're gonna realize this in the fall and the less productive people will get their food rationed first and hardest and odds are some of the old (so like 50s) or otherwise infirm people who are in this huge calorie deficit are gonna keel over from a minor cold or something during the winter. The calorie math is what is and no amount of "well they cared for the elderly when times were good" misdirection is going to change the raw math of how frequently times were bad and the number of elderly, infirm, etc, that a society routinely subject to those sorts of "purge lite" events is going to be carrying at any one time.
The Purge
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.
If she only doubled her money in 30 years, that’s only 2.3% CAGR, probably less than general inflation over that time period. Most housing, especially in wealthy areas, has appreciated significantly more rapidly.
I don't disagree but when my father passed, she took out some equity to pay his medical bills as well when she inherited the house. Life has a way of getting in the way.
Before the money is up... Move to thailand / malaysia / vietnam / mexico ? Do research online ?
Not sure where you / other siblings are based but find a place w good and cheap flight connections.
Changing sucks. Being forced to change even worse so maybe talk about options
(Or even a cheaper place in the usa)
Good luck
Dude, she’s in her 80s and needs the assistance.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
"Cheap rent sounds good on paper... but why would you work?"
hahahaha. A room in a house is going to cost you $1,800/month in San Francisco.
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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.
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).
> 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?
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.
Well sure but the person I responded to put the two together and implied that was the motive.
... and those people living on the street is better than them living under a roof?