Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates • Hacker News Board

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#331

Post by jedberg » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:24 PM UTC

silviogutierrez wrote: post #328

jedberg wrote: post #311

Edit: I was wrong, this was just made up by college kids. See comment below. Fun fact: In some college towns, they can only have fraternity houses but not sorority houses, because they still have laws on the books that define a house of prostitution as any house with at least three unrelated women living there.

Ackchyually… I think this is apocryphal. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brothel-laws-sororities/

Oh man, you're totally right! I never even considered that it was just a college rumor.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#332

Post by treis » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:24 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #110

9rx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the majority faction of the population want to force single family residences, what other majority faction is going to want to force a tax on it? Mathematically, you would need to find overlap where a large segment of the population want both single-family residences and to be taxed on it. Good luck.

You won't in the suburbs, which isn't where the problems lie. Nobody cares if you have a big single family residence when the land is plentiful. Major urban centers have enough renters to form a voting bloc, and this is where such a policy could be useful to increase housing supply.

Renters don't want to live next to a SRO/boarding house either.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#333

Post by zer00eyz » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #301

zer00eyz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 loc…

> Voters don't actually want house prices to come down. >> You have this wrong. But you don't refute this, if anything you make the case that, since the majority are homeowners, they would of course want ever-increasing home values. And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.

> But you don't refute this,

The 66 percent turn out rate is not that high period. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voter-turnou...

If non voting renters showed up, this could easily swing the other way. Renters are (generally) unmotivated to change their destiny at the voting booth.

> And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.

This is far far far more complicated than it looks. Because what is inflation vs increase in value after adjustment. There are plenty of places where housing has gone down in value (see Detroit, see Camden NJ). There are plenty of places where gentrification has changed whole regions (see the SF Bay Area).

There has also been a massive change in what we build (smaller homes, vs McMansions).

When you dig into the WHY of this, the destruction of old stock is a huge part of it (see Detroit). Massive changes to what and how we build (back to home owners and zoning) limiting growth in areas. Over regulation (see slow rebuilding in southern CA after fires, and the whole housing shortage here). NOTE: the ADU law that was an attempt to let home owners fix this themselves has been somewhat of a flop... however it is gaining momentum.

The fixes to housing in the US require voters to pass something where only a bit more than half of it would be "good" for them and in a hard to explain way. It is easy to get them to vote such a policy down when the 40 percent that might impact them makes for a clear cut argument for a NO.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#334

Post by tovej » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:26 PM UTC

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…

Somehow? Homeowners are obviously the more powerful group, and real estate ownership in the bigger picture is tied to even more powerful entities (big companies, banks, billionaires).

How many in the top 10% of the wealth distribution do you think are renters? How many in the bottom 20% do you think are homeowners?

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#335

Post by lazyasciiart » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

s0rce wrote: post #226

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…

I dont think we have restrictions here (SF Bay area) and a room in a shared apt/house is in many areas even more expensive ($1500-2000).

There’s pretty significant restrictions in most of the Bay Area. But even without restrictions, for decades the SF board of supervisors was actively demolishing SROs and trying to make housing more expensive so they had a better class of residents. https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#336

Post by petsfed » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:35 PM UTC

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #322

petsfed wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing you can never depend on racists for is consistency . There are political cartoons drawn by fascists from the 1920s that attempt to stave off accusations of racism by pointing out that they include Italians (then show Mussolini as a racist caricature of a black man), as if Italians aren't widely considered white . If you look at how the British and later Americans talked about the Irish "people" or "race", y…

Just for curiosity's sake, when you talk about Italians being widely considered white what context is that in? Because you later talk about anti-Irish racism in the US in the 20s and 30s and the experience was pretty similar for Italians in the US in that time period as well. I have living relatives that can give you firsthand accounts of open, organized, violent anti-Italian racism in Pittsburgh pre-mid WWII.

I mean modern day. What I'm trying to express is that "nobody today would be racist against $whateverGroup$!" has precisely zero bearing on what absolute batshit lunacy people were racist about even 50 years ago.

Its also the case that even in the 1920s, while there was a lot of anti-Italian racism, people generally saw that Italian heritage was better than African heritage.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#337

Post by danaris » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:35 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #245

supertrope wrote: post #219

Earlier 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…

OK, now extend that line of thought just a little bit further.

Why will the developer make more money if it's in an already developed area?

Because that area has better access to shops, schools, and workplaces.

Sure, you could build a giant apartment building out on the edge of town—the land would certainly be cheaper!

But, given how things are today, it's unlikely you'd ever fill it in a way that would recoup your investment. In order to make something like that work, what we'd really need is proper public transport that reliably stopped at (or near) such a development, with well-sited stops in town in order to allow residents to do all the things they need to do. To reach the things that are in the town.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#338

Post by kccqzy » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:41 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #21

cjs_ac wrote: post #5

In the UK, these are called Houses in Multiple Occupation. They are regulated, licensed and inspected to ensure that they're not dangerous. https://www.gov.uk/renting-out-a-property/houses-in-multiple...

The other responses to this post are very strange. Here in the UK I too lived in HMOs for many years while I was a student at university and later when I started working. It is simply a normal way of living if you're in your twenties. At no point did I live in a house that was a fire risk / 5 to a room / had anyone who had "checked out". It also let me live cheaply and save a lot of money, and I met many life-long fr…

When I was a student I had in fact lived in a room with 5 other people while doing a summer internship. This was in Palo Alto. Basically all people living there were interns. There was even a choice of male-only, female-only or mixed rooms. It wasn't bad. People knowingly chose this kind of arrangement, sacrificing their privacy in exchange for more social mingling, just like youth hostels. In my 20s I would be upset if coming back from work I stayed alone in a private room in a new city; living with people my age was better.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#339

Post by triceratops » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:42 PM UTC

bpt3 wrote: post #295

toomuchtodo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, they want the authority over the land without buying or otherwise having to expend finances to control the land.

That's not what I'm talking about at all. Zoning regulations should reflect the desires of a community, and there's no inherent reason they can't be more restrictive than yimbys would like.

> Zoning regulations should reflect the desires of a community

The community can express its desires by building whatever kind of housing they want on their property. What you're talking about is my property having to reflect the desires of the rest of the community.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#340

Post by danaris » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:43 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #321

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you used the word "entitled" though, and that has a specific meaning. why would nimbys be "entitled" to stop high density housing but yimbys not be "entitled" to do it? this contradiction resolves itself very neatly in a system where yimbys get to do what they want with their property and nimbys get to do what they want with theirs. It only gets complex when one person wants complete control of their property and als…

Because "yimby"s go to higher government to force localities to adopt rules they vote against, i.e. they get their way with authoritarian policies that apply outside of "their backyard". Some even think there should be national laws! They want their policies applied to essentially an entire continent. Nimbys typically don't care about things that are not part of their locality. San Francisco wants giant skyscrapers?…

And this is because individual property rights must not be sacrosanct in a civilized society.

We already have a number of rules of what you can and can't do with your private property that I think most people agree on. You can't build a slaughterhouse right in the middle of a residential area. You can't dump your garbage into the water flowing through your property. Etc.

Those are rules we all agree on because they have immediate and very visible primary effects.

The things we're talking about now are less visible secondary effects, but they're still very real.

The ability of our entire society to be able to securely and affordably house all its members is a much stronger imperative than the ability of people in any particular area to have nice views, or neighbors who all share the same socioeconomic class/skin color/native language as them.