Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates • Hacker News Board

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#71

Post by throw0101d » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

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…

> The article doesn't make this clear... is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?

A private bedroom but shared living/cooking space is generally called a rooming/boarding house:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house

* https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/mult...

There is a separate contract with each tenant (i.e., multiple contracts), and each tenant is only responsible for paying for their private area.

This differs from a roommate situation in that there is generally one contract with the entire group.

Similarly with subletting: there is one contract with the landlord and the 'main' tenant, and then that tenant then turns around creates separate contract between them and another tenant.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#72

Post by hiatus » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

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…

The article opens talking about boarding houses and moves on to discuss single-room occupancies which are the rental afforded by boarding houses. It is the renting of individual rooms that is illegal.

In any case, there is _some_ limit to the number of occupants allowed to coreside in a given residence. States tend to codify minimum square footage requirements on a per-person basis to determine occupancy limits for a particular building.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#73

Post by Traster » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

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 amount of housing they could in the 1980s. And of course, because of this arbitrage now a family that wants to live in that home is competing with the rental income of 5+ tenants in a HMO.

Surely, the correct solution is just to put in some simple rules to bring the cost of housing down. For example: planning restrictions are suspended until the average family home hits 3x average family income. Rather than just packing us like sardines into ever more expensive houses.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#74

Post by 9rx » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #15

bell-cot wrote: post #2

Zoning rules are awesome tools, for improving your own situation at the uncompensated expense of others. And what decent person would ever want to object, if 95% of the victims are both "not like us", and members of lower classes?

Zoning rules can be useful, but if they produce negative externalities then they should be taxed. Want to only allow single-family residences? Fine, but pay the city taxes on that privilege. Then use those funds to offset the negative externality.

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.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#75

Post by AlexandrB » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

red_rech wrote: post #22

Workaccount2 wrote: post #10

While these are great on paper, I think the part that needs solving is how to stop them from becoming dens of people who have checked out (voluntarily or not) of life/society. Getting a place to live in for $350/mo would be absolutely game changing for low income (and even middle income) people trying to build wealth. The downside though is that these places will invariably turn into social crack houses, rather than…

> The downside though is that these places will invariably turn into social crack houses, rather than the sunny smilely communal life ideals they are sold as. Ok, get rid of them, now the streets are social crack houses? What are we to do now? Perhaps the woodchipper?

I think everyone in this thread should read https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...

Addiction requires some level of coercive intervention to address. No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#76

Post by vidarh » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #7

bell-cot wrote: post #2

Zoning rules are awesome tools, for improving your own situation at the uncompensated expense of others. And what decent person would ever want to object, if 95% of the victims are both "not like us", and members of lower classes?

Or alternatively trying to not have an area run rampant with too many people living in a house causing fire risks. Or god forbid trying to plan a city for density, resources, school locations. Come on - zoning rules aren't some tool of repression. Sometimes they can be, but that isn't their raison d'etre.

If your housing pressure is so significant, or your poverty so extensive, that people are willing to live in unsafe, overcrowded situations, then trying to regulate that away is not very likely to improve things, but just push people into other negative situations, like illegal lets where they have little recourse to complain about problems without the risk of losing their home.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#77

Post by bluGill » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #49

xphos wrote: post #19

I 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…

> people living in them should just try not being to poor to have real housing Yes, unironically, they should. And most would be trying to do exactly that. I don’t know why some people treat economic status as some immutable property outside of your control. People move up and down in economic status all the time. And most people move up as they get older and get more work experience and higher paying jobs. Having a…

Most homeless have "mental issues". On a good day they will try, but they have bad days often enough. Sometimes mental issues are caused by 'hard drug' use, but there are plenty of other causes. Society has not found a good answer to these people (many of the things tried have been worse than living on the streets - despite a few freezing to death)

Some of the homeless could live in a roommate situation. Others are "so far gone" that no reasonable person would want to live with them, and they would destroy a room if allowed in one without supervision.

Homelessness is a hard problem. Anyone claiming they have a solution is wrong. However that doesn't mean we shouldn't try - just because you can't solve the problem doesn't mean you can't make things better for a subset.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#78

Post by potato3732842 » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

profsummergig wrote: post #3

bell-cot wrote: post #2

Zoning rules are awesome tools, for improving your own situation at the uncompensated expense of others. And what decent person would ever want to object, if 95% of the victims are both "not like us", and members of lower classes?

2nd order effects. One moment you allow multiple unrelated people to share a house. Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard. My peeve is about banning of growing food in your front yard in many states. So much available land going waste growing grass (that is not even fed to cows).

>One moment you allow multiple unrelated people to share a house.

>Next moment they're living 5 to a room and there are 8 cars parked in their front yard.

Is it on their property? If so not my problem.

Having principals and sticking to them makes reasoning about the subjects so easy.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#79

Post by cyberclimb » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #32

Where are these types of places illegal in reality? I know of single room rentals available in pretty much every major metro in the world. Shared common bathroom and kitchen. I also know of one in plenty of subletting of multi-bedroom apartments. I have never heard of enforcement against this. It also doesn’t bring rents down as much as claimed.

In the Netherlands from what I've seen (at least around Amsterdam) it's almost always forbidden for houses to be rented out to a group of flatmates (e.g. students), some people go so far as to fake relationships to imply they're a couple instead.

I'm not sure if this an actual law but housing listings often imply its forbidden in the neighborhood, they're looking for couples and families with kids.

Re: Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

#80

Post by Workaccount2 » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

mig4ng wrote: post #30

Workaccount2 wrote: post #10

While these are great on paper, I think the part that needs solving is how to stop them from becoming dens of people who have checked out (voluntarily or not) of life/society. Getting a place to live in for $350/mo would be absolutely game changing for low income (and even middle income) people trying to build wealth. The downside though is that these places will invariably turn into social crack houses, rather than…

I have been sharing house with a roommate for years now (in Portugal), and I prefer it to living alone. Even with a girlfriend, I highly prefer to live in a house with more people. I come from a "big" family, and I am used to movement where I live. And living alone or just with one person, makes my energy go down. Now that I plan on moving to Paraguay, I am looking for co-living options or someone to rent place with.…

Living with roommates is not the same thing as an SRO. While both meet the strict definition of "living with roommates", one of these situations you get pick who you live with (or at least ideologically aligned), in the other you don't.