221–230 of 418 posts
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.
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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…
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 sam…
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.
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…
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 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.
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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 hav…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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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 als…
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.
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.
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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...
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.
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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.
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…
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…
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.