Live data from Hacker News

Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

marginalrevolution.com

391–400 of 418 posts

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#391
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume positive intent. I flagged your comment because you made a false and scurrilous insinuation about my intentions. I'm not a UK citizen or resident and don't care about their immigration policy one way or another. But a high immigration rate will obviously increase housing demand: this is basic macroeconomics and trivially true. The UK net immigration rate has been high relative to other countries worldwide, esp…

Because that’s what your source said?

In general I'm happy to debate about facts but I'm not going to engage with someone who makes slimy, low-effort insinuations about motives.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#392
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barring restrictions is absolutely not “forcing” anyone to do anything. Take away all restrictions on my lot and I am still not forced to develop on it.

Let me know your address so I can buy the adjacent properties and force you to live next to a landfill or move away from your now-worthless home.

It may surprise you but I’m not actually scared of that happening. I’m actually zoned for the house next door to me to turn into a seven story building, which many in my city think is horrifying, but I’m not scared of that either.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the biggest reason I became a pro-density advocate is because low-density communities are almost always tax-revenue-negative[1], given that the cost of things like roads, water and sewer infrastructure scale with land area. What NIMBYs often seem to want are the amenities of city living (like a sewer instead of a septic tank in your yard) without the people, and that just doesn’t work. [1]: https://youtu.be/…

The suburbs I've lived in have spent far more on things that scale with population (primarily education) than things that scale with area. You also can't split revenue from downtown commercial areas out from surrounding residential like that. Are businesses "subsidizing" residents? Of course not. That doesn't even make sense as a question.

[deleted]

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#394
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does social media solve the issue? I don't think it matters if the landlord or the tenant is advertising sexist/racist housing opportunities, its still sexist and racist, blocking certain groups from accessing housing. Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.

> How does social media solve the issue?

Huh? Who said anything about social media? Churches and other religious organizations are basically designed to promote and foster these kinds of in-group relationships.

> Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.

It would be very strange to tell someone they can’t decide their own roommate because their selection would be “racist/sexist.” I’m trying to imagine how you would even go about enforcing that at the individual level. Is your plan to assign housing randomly with some centralized lottery system? Extract affadavits from prospective tenants?

Do you believe it’s sexist for a heterosexual woman to use a dating website to look for a husband and not a wife? I don’t see why your logic wouldn’t apply there.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#395
post #295

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.

Severely limiting the property rights of anyone owning land there doesn’t necessarily seem reasonable

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barring restrictions is absolutely not “forcing” anyone to do anything. Take away all restrictions on my lot and I am still not forced to develop on it.

A law negating a covenant everyone entered into willingly and freely does kinda alter the deal after its made. I do wholeheartedly agree that removing zoning restrictions doesn't impinge on anyone's liberty though.

> and freely

If that was the case i.e. nobody wanted to build anything new on their land why would the “convenant” be necessary. Or is the idea that former owners can impose these decisions they made on anyone they sell the property to?

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Living in shared flats is very common in Germany presumably most of Europe. It's common in the United States, too. This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced. Any college town will have houses full of college students. In my experience, the only enforcement actions were when landlords were renting out houses to more people than they had rooms, so they had situations where one p…

> This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced. Let me introduce to the concept of rubber laws, a beloved tool of every totalitarian states. I now pass over to GPT: “Rubber laws are vague catch-all offenses—like old vagrancy or ‘disorderly conduct’ laws on steroids. Because they’re so unclear, authorities can always say you broke one, and they use that flexibility to target inconve…

> I now pass over to GPT

Please don't do this.

Non-attributed data from LLMs (known for bullshitting) is not helpful.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#398
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know your address so I can buy the adjacent properties and force you to live next to a landfill or move away from your now-worthless home.

It may surprise you but I’m not actually scared of that happening. I’m actually zoned for the house next door to me to turn into a seven story building, which many in my city think is horrifying, but I’m not scared of that either.

If you legitimately would have no issues being surrounded by a landfill, you're such an outlier that your opinion is basically meaningless.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#399
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Severely limiting the property rights of anyone owning land there doesn’t necessarily seem reasonable

It's not a severe limitation to tell someone that everyone who lives in an area agreed to something that they'll have to adhere to if they want to live there also.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#400
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything. Of course. > Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around. Pro-housing people in my area absolutely are trying to force people to do th…

Honestly the biggest reason I became a pro-density advocate is because low-density communities are almost always tax-revenue-negative[1], given that the cost of things like roads, water and sewer infrastructure scale with land area. What NIMBYs often seem to want are the amenities of city living (like a sewer instead of a septic tank in your yard) without the people, and that just doesn’t work. [1]: https://youtu.be/…

Posting a video from a highly biased source is not very convincing.

Almost every household with a child is tax revenue negative, and I don't think you're suggesting we reform education funding to correct that.

Post reply on HN