Sharing Will Shelter Us, Part 2: Legalizing Sharing
On the need for removing 'unrelated occupant' restrictions
Here’s a strange truth about my suggestions in our last post, “Sharing Will Shelter Us”: there are many places where sharing housing with others who aren’t your family is against the law, or nearly so.
Many cities have a history of limiting the number of “unrelated occupants” in a given home. These are not city codes that recognize the concept of “chosen kin” but that constrain the definition of family. Take New York City, where family is defined as “Two or more persons related by blood, adoption, legal guardianship, marriage or domestic partnership.” New York limits the number of “unrelated persons” to three, which means two unmarried couples could not legally rent a two-bedroom apartment together.
There is a current trend of removing such prohibitions, but it’s a recent one. It has only been in the last few years that Oregon and Washington, for instance, have both passed state legislation preventing cities from basing their occupancy laws based on family ties.
Before then, however, most cities in the region did have such restrictions. Some were more lax; Portland capped unrelated occupancy at six, compared to NYC’s three. But just up the road from me in Medford, OR, the unrelated occupants cap was only two people. Meaning that in Medford you and your best friend could have shared a house, but finding a roommate for the extra bedroom to help manage the cost of rent? Technically against the law.
Sightline has details on some of the past restrictions in other cities around the PNW. Not all were as shameful as Medford’s, and as they note, many were unevenly enforced.
Oregon and Washington are now ahead of the curve. Only two other states, California and New Jersey, have taken action to address the issue at the state level. Everywhere else, it’s a city by city fight — or sometimes an HOA by HOA fight, as some HOAs will adopt restrictions even when not required by local zoning. Most major urban areas in the U.S. restrict the number of unrelated persons that can live together (see the appendix of this report on housing cost and household size for a rundown of such restrictions).
The present cost of housing is an obvious reason why the tide is turning against such regulations, but it’s not true everywhere. Many of the original codes on this matter are from earlier in the 20th century, but some are more recent; as recently as 2013, Watertown, NY, for instance, banned having housemates.
Sharing housing — whether with single housemates or with whole other families — is a way of embedding solidarity in the everyday. It’s a cooperative strategy for weathering a for-profit economy ill-designed to meet the daily needs of most people rather than in a win-it-all, “climb the corporate ladder and leave everyone else behind” strategy. Given that shelter is one of the most basic of human needs, it seems more than bizarre that at times when housing may be scarce, we would hinder rather than encourage the sharing of housing as a way to make sure everyone is sheltered.
If you’ve been looking for one low bar but meaningful systemic change to help make where you live — one that will make headway on one of the thorniest contemporary issues (again, homelessness was at a record high last year) —why not take action to legalize the sharing of housing by removing restrictions on unrelated occupancy from your local zoning code? Local officials are always looking for something that looks like a win on improving the situation around housing, and how often do they get presented with solutions that are essentially free to implement?
Researching this post I discovered, retroactively, that more than a number of my past living situations were certainly in violation of respective local codes. Given that neither my landlords nor myself ever received any grief about the matter, and that enforcement of such matters is almost certainly haphazard everywhere, you may wonder about the value of bothering with making sure such laws are actually updated.
To that I would say: many kinds of code violations are used mostly as excuses for police action against those already vulnerable to state-sponsored violence. Code updates like this reduce the number of items that you or others in your community can be hassled about, while at the same time shrinking the toolkit that for-profit landlords have at their disposal to keep others out of housing. Abandoning unrelated occupancy caps isn’t the biggest thing that can be done, but it’s definitely meaningful.
A worthwhile reform that is also a relatively easy and attainable win — we could use more of those these days, I’m sure.
Before I go, one more update from our first post on this topic, where I also wrote about the work of the Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network, and the upcoming Mutual Aid 101 series that Shareable is hosting online in February. Speakers have now been finalize and registration is open; you’ll want to register for each session separately.
You can sign up for the initial Intro to Mutual session here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mutual-aid-101-intro-to-mutual-aid-tickets-1203535961459
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg