This is a prime example of what advocates mean when they say "decriminalize housing".
Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
251–260 of 418 posts
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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.
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#253The 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…
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…
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.
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 logica…
>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…
>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.
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#255The 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…
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.
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#257For 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…
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.
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#258This 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?
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#259I 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 SR…
We already have SROs, they're just informal subletting arrangements - aka "having roommates". SROs would legitimize what is already being done and fix a lot of problems with the arrangement being informal. i.e. how do you evict someone you're illegally subletting your apartment to without risking getting other people also evicted?
In terms of dignity, the scale goes, from less to more dignified:
1. Homelessness (at least, being on the street) 2. Informal subletting 3. SROs
Furthermore, dignity is not the only variable we need to consider. The rise in unsheltered homeless has resulted in a commensurate rise of hostile architecture - i.e. physical DRM to prevent homeless people from pirating the concept of shelter. This has measurably reduced the quality of public spaces, transit, and intercity travel. It would be better for society if we didn't do this.
Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.