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Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

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Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#201

Post by basisword »

Traster wrote: post #73

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…

>> 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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#202

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#203

Post by zachkatz »

paulcole wrote: post #153
dkarl wrote: post #65

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 kitc…

> 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...

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#204

Post by physicsguy »

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#205

Post by visarga »

advisedwang wrote: post #185

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…

I think you just push the problem away, now you got homeless people.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#206

Post by toomuchtodo »

bpt3 wrote: post #199
toomuchtodo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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/

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#207

Post by SoftTalker »

alistairSH wrote: post #188
jaredklewis wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#208

Post by physicsguy »

basisword wrote: post #201
Traster wrote: post #73

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…

>> 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…

> 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

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#209

Post by bilbo0s »

SoftTalker wrote: post #169
bilbo0s wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#210

Post by potato3732842 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #163
danaris wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

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