Just be richer
Criminalizing poverty is the hot new thing, which is especially fun at a time when wages at least in the US have been deliberately held down while housing costs skyrocket. A town near Kansas City has just voted to make it illegal to share housing.
On Monday, a Johnson County city unanimously voted to ban a living arrangement aimed at helping tenants decrease the amount of rent they pay.
The Shawnee City Council voted 8-0 to ban co-living, becoming among the first Kansas City area municipalities to prevent the practice, which has gained popularity in recent years as rent and home prices have soared.
The new ordinance defines a co-living group as a group of at least four unrelated adults living together in a dwelling unit. The ordinance stated that if one adult is unrelated to another adult, then the entire group will be classified as unrelated.
In other words a roommate/housemate type situation – a shared apartment or house. No no, you can’t do that, you have to rent your own apartment, which costs more money than you earn. Good luck!
Remind us what the US minimum wage is? $7.25 an hour. When was it last raised? July 2009. What have housing costs done since then? Gone straight up like the Saturn 5.
Kansas City is probably cheaper than Seattle, but that’s not saying much. Renting an apartment on the minimum wage isn’t going to leave much for the other minor details of life such as eating food.
The practice, which includes things like sharing a kitchen, living room and community areas, started to gain popularity as rental and housing prices continued to increase across the United States.
While wages stagnated. Don’t forget that part. At least at the bottom end they did. I don’t know, maybe the tech lords pay their people better, but Amazon warehouse workers don’t make the big bucks.
“Co-living has become increasingly popular because of its cost effectiveness and greater flexibility in cities where rents are high for young professionals,” The Washington Post wrote in 2019.
Hi, guess what, it’s not just the “young professionals,” it’s also and much more the non-professionals of all ages.
The City Council’s vote came despite a presentation from a Johnson County organization where a housing study showed that the average home price in the county rose 37% from 2017-2021, climbing from $324,393 to $443,700. The study also showed that wages did not rise at that same rate.
To put it mildly.
Maybe these councilors will be able to explain logic and compassion behind their reasoning as they’re led to the tumbrils.
Infuriating.
It’s also better for the environment, but of course they don’t care about that.
Also, laws like these are often aimed at immigrants, who are more likely to live in group homes of unrelated adults.
What the hell happened to freedom of association?
Reminds me of the old saw that “the rich, as well as the poor, are prohibited from sleeping under bridges.”
@WAM #3, I think you nailed it, there. Immigrants are taking low-wage jobs in meat plants and other low-wage jobs in the Great Midwest, and the Good People of Shawnee want them to take the work but just don’t want them living there.
Here in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, we passed rent control because the rents are growing (even though our populations are shrinking to the suburbs) way too fast, and all of a sudden no one can afford to be a landlord. Construction has halted, apparently. While I sympathize with the mom-and-pop landlords who bought rental property to supplement their social security, I find it hard to believe that profit margins are so thin on 20 year old buildings I rented for $700 in the aughts, but are now going for $1400, that a mere 3% rise in rent next year will cause mass bankruptcy in the landlord class.
There are corporations that use computer algorithms to make cash offers to newly listing sellers in a tight market, so they can rent the homes rather than allow private buyers the chance to build weatlth by buying their own homes. These corporations concentrate in neighbordhoods that would have a higher concenration of minority homeowners (once areas that were redlined.) This is part of the reason that there is such a wealth-disparity between black and white Americans. Maybe the rent-control will help fix this and discourage such corporate property vultures from buying up homes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-investors-housing-market.html
College students have been doing it forever. Baby Boomers often had lots of people in one apartment, with a couple of mattresses on the floor and an enormous stereo system.
When I was working for minimum wage (back in the 1970s) and still couldn’t afford to rent with two friends planning to go in with me. (I lived in a town where rents had been kept deliberately high to keep the riff-raff out. My family and I were the riff-raff.)