Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates

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 blocking certain raises or genders from renting.

3/ Many local codes were written with “traditional families” in mind. Some municipalities cap unrelated adults per household (e.g., “no more than 3 unrelated people”), which makes normal roommate setups technically non-compliant even if the lease is joint.

4/ Standard renters or homeowners policies often don’t contemplate multiple unrelated parties. Landlords worry about claims, while tenants may find themselves uncovered in disputes or accidents.

I tried to get umbrella insurance for myself, but because I rent out other rooms and I didn't want to also cover my 2-3 roommates, I am forced to go uncovered or find another provider.

It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.

Like I can see why life in a house with 5 people might in some ways be more difficult than life in a house with 4 or 3, but I don't see why it should be illegal. People can think about these things for themselves and decide what works for them.

Sure, most houses won't accommodate 5 roommates, but there also a lot of extremely large houses in this country. Is there any benefit at all to having some weird, arbitrary 4 person cap? Like a cap per area of space might make sense, but just a limit of 4 regardless of anything?

Everything in the US is legally regulated to such an absurd degree. Where I live a gym needs a certain number of parking spaces per square feet. A clothing store needs a different number. A restaurant yet another different number. A business needs to have electrical outlets every so many feet. Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need? No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.

I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom" (because that's super effective).

> 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.

> is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?

Too many unrelated people living in a housing unit is illegal. Here’s San Francisco’s version of this law which was used to shut down house sharing companies such as HubHaus; see definition of “family” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

The article also mentioned dormitory-like “group housing” apartments (which differ from housing units in that they don’t have a separate kitchen for each unit). San Francisco is pretty enlightened in that it allows group housing in many zoning districts, but even they have group housing density limits and now common space requirements which are designed to prevent much group housing (see definition of “group housing” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).

How it works is the county or muni specifies the number. This is similar to allocating land for single family or multi tenant. You can of course bypass this and rent rooms or have a group house, but renters may not have the same legal protections.

No-one wants to live like MacArthur Park area in LA, that has 4x the density of Manhattan, NY, where every apartment has a shadow family that is evicted every year or two.

Wow. I went to college in Utah and had 5 roommates. A total of two rooms. It was a blast.

I’m not sure what the article is complaining about. I know 2 per bedroom is widely allowed in the US. But more isn’t. It seems like the article is looking to revitalize the concept of a large dormitory where people mostly just come to sleep. Maybe I’m wrong but the article doesn’t do a good job of saying what the problem is.

Either way I don’t think most millennials want more than 2 per room anyway.

> or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room

Based on personal experiences I would say that it's only individual leases that are illegal. I lived in an SRO back in college without even realizing it was an SRO, rooms were rented out individually and everyone had a separate lease.

The more common version of this is to just do it privately with your friends or other people that you meet. If that's illegal then that will be news to me and like half my friends that currently live with roommates. Doing it privately raises a number of issues around housing discrimination. A landlord cannot stop you from renting a unit/room but there's nothing stopping a roommate from refusing to sign with you if they don't like some characteristic about you, granted in reality you probably wouldn't want to have that person as a roommate anyways.

Granted there might have been laws in place where I used to rent that capped the number of un-related folks living together but in my experience the landlord never brought it up, likely cause they knew enforcement would just never happen.

In the 1970s, it was usual for working class newlyweds would have to live with their parents until they were able to find housing. That's why second-rate comedians of the time like Les Dawson had so many mother-in-law jokes: there was an awful lot of resentment between young men and their mothers-in-law to exploit. There's nothing new about multiple families crowding into houses designed for just one family in this country - that's why there are so many pubs.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been identified as a cause of insufficient housebuilding activity, and new legislation is currently working its way through the House of Lords to alleviate this.

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 an extra logical leap required of them.

>> 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

This isn't correct. When a house is split into multiple flats, they're individual flats rented out under separate agreements and not a HMO.

A HMO is when that house is rented to a group of people who are unrelated to each other (i.e. not of the same 'household'). They are generally jointly and severally liable (under an AST). They each have a bedroom and share kitchen/bathroom/common areas. HMO's have stricter health & safety regulations. For example, doors must be the automatically closing fire doors that you get in public buildings.

Or fix both.

Housing in UK/US seems to suffer from simultaneous under-and over- regulation. We over-regulate urban infill housing, and over-regulate the types of housing you can build. We under-regulate landowner profits by letting them keep land rents.

A holistic fix would address both causes of failure in the housing market.

The UK has also had extremely high immigration rates since the 1980s. Whether that's good or bad policy isn't my place to say, but it certainly places extreme pressure on the housing market.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...

I think you just push the problem away, now you got homeless people.

You can prevent slums without outlawing this type of housing, they just need to be actively managed. Require landlords via regulation to keep up maintenance and evict unruly tenants, and actually enforce those laws.

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 friends.

Moreover, we have tax breaks encouraging a home owner to rent out a spare room or two. (Though if the home owner is living in the house, the renter's rights are much less and there isn't the same level of regulation as if the owner is remote.)

> They are regulated, licensed and inspected to ensure that they're not dangerous.

ish.., to the level of attention councils can afford to do so in an era of tight local government finances, and in the backdrop of limited housing stock making it difficult to refuse planning permission.

Well, TIL that 3-4 sharing is a HMO, but doesn't require a licence. That makes no sense..

Mandatory low density zoning in general serves that purpose, yes.

If you need to own or rent a certain amount of land in order to attend the local school, then you can effectively keep out the poors (or even middle class, potentially).

No, that type of arrangement isn't common. Very few people want to rent a bedroom as a business office. And most renters looking to sublease a room do so because they need the cash: paying them less doesn't solve their problem.

> I wonder, is this kind of arrangement common

No.

They want $X per month, they don't want significantly less than $X per month.

In Portland, Oregon, a private single-person WeWork office is around $600/month. There are almost no roommate situations that are going to be available for that price.

>> Where are these types of places illegal in reality?

Because eventually individual rooms start being rented by families. Next you have four families living in a single-family occupancy location and there is a huge fire hazard. I've seen this happen in NYC growing up, and its super dangerous. I also empathize with the other side -- as a poor person you may have no other option.

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.

They’re (SROs) illegal in every major US city.

I've seen them in posher suburban towns and a lot of HOAs. It's usually worded that no more than 2-4 non relatives can share a single residence. You won't find it in the more working class towns and cities. I have seen some Florida coastal towns, like the Keys, enable a maximum in order to push out the working poor who may be living 6-8 in a 2-bedroom house or apartment.

You aren't in the neighborhoods where this has been in place. But it doesn't mean its not happening.

If it's illegal you're in a situation where the landlord likes money and the tenants like not being homeless. In a house where 4th amendment rights are strongest.

In practice I think it's about impossible to enforce. Code enforcement or police would need a warrant to enter, and in most jurisdictions the complaints are public record far enough ahead of time anyone with the slightest bit of foresight would get ahead of it.

In my county sometimes I monitor the local complaints, mostly initially when I was looking at properties because I did not want to live next to a neighbor who likes to be a busybody to the code enforcement. There are a number of properties that just lock their gates whenever a code complaints happen or tell code inspection to kick rocks, by the time they come back with a warrant the situation is faked well enough they can't do anything.

To answer my own question. No state prohibits subletting. Maine law gives renters the right to sublet, New York limits the reasons landlords can refuse subletting, and all other states leave it up to the landlord (with differences in details, such as the default if the lease doesn't explicitly prohibit or allow it).

However, many states and/or cities do limit the number of unrelated individuals living together, and this applies whether they are all on the lease, or subletted. A brief search shows different areas have limits of no more than 2, 3, 4 or 5 unrelated individuals.

I've just happened to live in places that allow 4 or 5 unrelated individuals, and never rented a house with more than that many bedrooms/roomates.