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Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

marginalrevolution.com

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Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#261

Post by oceanplexian »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #175
SoftTalker wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

> 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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#262

Post by mothballed »

jojomodding wrote: post #258

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 count…

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#263

Post by jjice »

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#264

Post by loeg »

physicsguy wrote: post #204

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…

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#265

Post by stego-tech »

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#266

Post by zer00eyz »

tormeh wrote: post #98
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…

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…

> 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).

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#267

Post by coryrc »

bilbo0s wrote: post #209
SoftTalker wrote: post #169

Earlier 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…

> 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).

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#268

Post by physicsguy »

basisword wrote: post #220
physicsguy wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

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)

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#269

Post by lazide »

stego-tech wrote: post #265

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…

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#270

Post by physicsguy »

loeg wrote: post #264
physicsguy wrote: post #204

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…

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.
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