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Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

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Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#181

Post by anal_reactor »

cyberclimb wrote: post #79
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #32

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.

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".

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#182

Post by jaredklewis »

alistairSH wrote: post #34

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…

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).

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#183

Post by [deleted] »

jaredklewis wrote: post #182
alistairSH wrote: post #34

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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#184

Post by gosub100 »

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#185

Post by advisedwang »

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#186

Post by potato3732842 »

gryfft wrote: post #116
AlexandrB wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 syst…

> 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 af…

>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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#188

Post by alistairSH »

jaredklewis wrote: post #182
alistairSH wrote: post #34

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…

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#189

Post by [deleted] »

AlexandrB wrote: post #130
gryfft wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 af…

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...

[deleted]

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#190

Post by TimorousBestie »

bsghirt wrote: post #178
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.
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