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America’s empty bedrooms are up for grabs

Todd Waller wasn’t expecting to spend the latter half of his 30s living with roommates. But in late 2022, following a breakup with his girlfriend, he needed to find a new place to live, quickly.  A social worker based in the Atlanta metro, Waller started googling “efficiency apartments” and stumbled onto an ad for PadSplit, a company founded in 2017 that lets property owners rent out individual furnished bedrooms in single-family homes by the week. “It said I could get approved right away and move in tomorrow,” he recalled. There was no security deposit required. All of a sudden, Waller found himself living with six other people and able to save a lot of money. His rent was just $180 per week, or less than $800 per month. Though he earned a decent salary, he never really had anything left over after all his bills were paid, and the new financial breathing room made the tradeoff of housemates feel worth it. Key takeaways Cities spent much of the 20th century banning cheap rented rooms, and a 1974 Supreme Court ruling still lets them decide who counts as a “family” under zoning law. That’s now being challenged on two fronts. A Kansas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to revisit that precedent, and “Golden Girls” bills that have already passed in four states and are spreading. The next few years will determine whether co-living stays a niche workaround or becomes a normal option, with more states set to take up the issue in 2027. After a while, Waller decided he would be willing to upgrade to a nicer PadSplit unit, one with more amenities but still with roommates. Now he pays $1,250 a month to live on one side of a 2,000-square-foot home, with access to his own private bathroom, a private entrance, and a renovated kitchen. Three other people live on the other side of the house, and he rarely interacts with them. “My house is awesome; I pay $500 less a month than I would if I were renting [a place of my own] without roommates, and I just was able to buy a new car,” he told me. He knows one day he’ll move somewhere else and perhaps even buy his own home, but he likes that he feels he can make that decision comfortably at his own pace. With rents outpacing wages in most of the country, legislators are increasingly looking at co-living — sometimes called house-sharing or adult dorm rooms — as an overlooked piece of America’s housing stock. Zillow counts roughly 21 million “empty nest households” — or homes where older residents living with no children have at least two extra bedrooms. Some lawmakers want to make it easier for those homeowners to rent them out, which could put workers closer to their jobs and help seniors stay in houses they can no longer afford alone. Others are eyeing a different kind of vacancy: Post-pandemic remote work has left about a fifth of American office space empty, and there’s growing interest in turning some of it into apartments.  Many advocates for people experiencing homelessness also argue that co-living is a needed solution, something that could help people going through emergencies avoid the scary slide into shelter living, especially models where you can move in almost immediately and without a deposit. PadSplit surveyed its renters in December and found a population that mostly works (83 percent were employed) and mostly hadn’t been to college. The median income was $32,500. That co-living needs advocates at all is a legacy of the last century. Renting a single room in a boarding house or residential hotel was once an ordinary way to live in an American city, but in the decades after World War II those rooms became shorthand for poverty and vice, and cities responded by banning new ones and paying landlords to get rid of the old. Half a century later, many people still see sharing space with strangers as a last resort, or feel embarrassed about having roommates past a certain age. And discriminatory zoning codes written in that era are still on the books in most communities, enforcing traditional nuclear family arrangements when it comes to single-family housing, by defining “family” as people related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Those rules can be wielded against home-sharing, and against specific renters neighbors want to keep out. But these longstanding barriers are starting to finally give. Doubling up with people you aren’t related to is less unusual than it used to be. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of households sharing space with nonrelatives grew by more than 500,000. Lawmakers desperate for anything that adds more housing supply also seem less picky about where it comes from. Companies like PadSplit are putting private capital behind the model, and a wave of new laws and litigation — much of it led by conservative legal groups arguing on property-rights grounds — is making it harder for cities to tell homeowners who can and cannot sleep in their spare rooms.  For the first time since cities banned cheap rooms, the people trying to bring them back have the momentum, and the next couple of years will go a long way toward deciding whether co-living stays a niche workaround for people like Waller or becomes something a lot more people are able to consider. The return of SROs At the turn of the 20th century, as American cities swelled, immigrants, day laborers, and factory workers crowded into downtowns looking for somewhere cheap and temporary to sleep. A small room could be rented by the day, the week, or however long someone needed it. Some “boarded” in private homes while others took beds in bottom-rung hotels known as flophouses. These arrangements varied widely, but became broadly known as single-room occupancies (SROs). The turn against them came after World War II, as middle-class white families decamped for roomy new houses in the suburbs, and SROs grew more closely associated with shoddy housing for the poor and the deviant. New York and other cities started banning SRO construction in the 1950s. By the 1970s, SROs were a regular media villain, even as they still housed hundreds of thousands of people, including the mentally ill who had been turned out by the closing of state asylums. Cities started to offer landlords incentives to convert their SROs into luxury rentals. Between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, roughly a million of these affordable market-rate units disappeared from the market across the country. The idea that perhaps cities made a mistake in banning these lower-cost housing options has been simmering in urbanist policy circles for the last 15 years, particularly as the homelessness crisis has gotten worse. The Furman Center at NYU argued in 2018 that reintroducing SROs could help address the housing shortage. The architecture critic Karrie Jacobs argued in 2021 that cities had blamed a kind of housing for problems that belonged to the people living in it. “The notion took hold that if you eliminated the housing, the marginal people would simply vanish,” she wrote in Curbed. Still, lawmakers have dragged their feet on actually making it easier to rent these kinds of units again, and until recently the people pushing for it had little to show beyond op-eds and white papers. What’s different now is that the fight has moved out of the world of policy papers and into places where it can produce actual results, including a lawsuit that could reach the Supreme Court. Suing over who counts as family In early 2022, a home-sharing startup called HomeRoom was renting out two houses in Shawnee, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. The company rented rooms one at a time to unrelated adults who wanted cheaper housing, and at a local city council meeting that year, Shawnee’s community development director asked whether the city should support such arrangements in single-family neighborhoods at all. Two months later, the council passed an ordinance banning “co-living groups,” which it defined as four or more unrelated adults sharing a home.  Under the ordinance, if even one adult in a house wasn’t related to the others by blood, marriage, or adoption, the whole household counted as unrelated. While the new law forced HomeRoom to evict its tenants, it also put Val French, a Shawnee homeowner, in a bad situation. She lived with her husband, their two adult sons, and one son’s girlfriend. Because the girlfriend was related to no one, the house was now deemed in violation of the city’s occupancy rules. Her son and his girlfriend had to move out, and French couldn’t rent the empty room to anyone else. French and HomeRoom sued in federal court in May 2023, with assistance from the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. They argued that their right to choose who they live with is protected under the 14th Amendment, but they ran into legal precedent from a 1974 Supreme Court case, Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, which upheld a Long Island village’s nearly identical rule against six college students sharing a house. The decision came down in the same years cities were clearing out their SROs, and it has given local governments cover to decide who counts as a family ever since. A federal judge dismissed the Shawnee suit in September 2023, citing Belle Terre, and this past April the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the dismissal. A few months later, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case and reconsider Belle Terre once and for all. The precedent has already frayed in places — state courts in California, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have struck down local “unrelated occupants” limits under their own laws — but it still governs everywhere else.  There is “a fundamental liberty right to choose household living companions — whether as an articulation of the right of intimate association or independently — that is deeply rooted in American history and tradition,” PLF’s lead attorney on the case, David Deerson, told me.  The Supreme Court hears only about 1 percent of the cases it’s asked to take, and even if it t

What should you do if your friend is in love with you?

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have. My best friend confessed his love for me one year ago and I rejected him because I was unhappily in love with another man, and I was never really physically attracted to my best friend. He was devastated. I am happy our friendship survived. Over a year later, I find myself thinking about how it would be like to be in a relationship with my best friend. He is the only man who ever showed me genuine love and support, and I wonder what if I try…maybe I will fall in love with him. However, I am concerned about hurting his feelings again. Is it selfish of me wanting to try this love out because it promises security and appreciation? Dear Fanning the Flame, I can’t blame you for being curious about the common “friends to lovers” storyline. It’s often portrayed as the best kind of pairing: Two people have the foundation of their friendship plus a newfound love; the romantic relationship is like a soaring addition to an existing sturdy house.  But real life is not always like the movies, and it sounds to me like you haven’t actually had an awakening of desire for your friend. In fact, it’s the opposite: He once expressed feelings for you, and you confronted a lack of physical attraction for this person. Now you’re wondering if it would be possible for you to fall in love if you tried. I think you’d agree that your timing is suspect. After a breakup, it’s common and understandable to seek out comfort and intimacy. Still, I detect a philosophical streak in your question beyond the issue of whether or not this would simply be a rebound.  Have a question you want answered in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here! If your friend has always appreciated you, made you feel safe, and loves you — could that be a form of love that’s better than what you had in your last relationship? Maybe that is what love is. Is it? Over a long night of drinking some 2,400 years ago, one group of thinkers allegedly debated the true nature of love, as Greek philosopher Plato describes in The Symposium.  Aristophanes, a playwright, tells a story that most closely aligns with the love we see in the rom-coms of today. He said that humans used to be larger creatures with four arms and four legs. After annoying the gods, Zeus cuts all the humans in half, creating the two-limbed bodies we have today. The result is that people wander the world looking for the one person who used to literally complete them. If you followed Aristophanes’s fable, you shouldn’t try to be with your friend unless you felt that deep longing that one has when meeting their other half.  The rest of the dinner party companions have more circumspect ideas. Phaedrus, a Greek aristocrat, thought that true love inspired people to become the best possible version of themselves. Pausanias, a military man, thought that love driven only by attraction to someone’s body was “vulgar love”, and that “noble love” was the love of someone’s values. Eryximachus, a doctor, asserts that love is also about moderation, and it needs order, much in the way the natural world does. Finally, Socrates says that even if you start out with physical infatuation, you can eventually transcend that and end up loving wisdom itself, the highest form of love. As I read it, the men are grappling with how to make love make sense, while acknowledging that it can make us lustful and impulsive. Shouldn’t its best manifestations instead be practical and virtuous?    You could easily justify trying to date your friend with these theories that try to wrangle and tame love. For example, if your friend inspires you to be the best version of yourself, you could decide that’s enough to go for it. You could also decide that because you admire your friend’s character, and not his body, that’s a noble love, and better than the vulgar love of attraction.  German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his 19th-century essay “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” that he distrusted the feeling of being desperately in love. He considered romantic love to be a biological drive disguised as a real emotion — one whose goal is to trick us into procreating. You could even see your lack of attraction as an indication that you’re able to act more rationally, and not be deceived by that cunning trickster, passion.  I know you’ve recently gone through a breakup, but I hope you can feel how bleak these views can become: to see love only as the window dressing for the propagation of a species, or as just a bridge to the love of wisdom.  This cynicism has other consequences. Wondering if you could redefine love in a relationship with your friend isn’t like a wine-fueled dinner party bouncing around thought experiments. It involves your best friend and his own feelings too, and could risk not only hurting him, but also robbing him of a better romantic partner.  For Simone de Beauvoir, the 20th-century existential philosopher, the most important aspect of life was freedom: We are technically free to do whatever we want, and it’s the choices we make with that freedom that determine our authenticity, or lack of it. De Beauvoir worried about forms of love that stole freedom from other people. In narcissistic love, she wrote in The Second Sex, a partner doesn’t love the other person, but loves the fact that the other loves them. It’s a relationship built on the self-interest of one of its members.  I want to gently point out that it sounds like there may be aspects of the narcissistic relationship in your dilemma. While it may be intriguing to consider what it’s like to date a friend, you don’t seem to be as romantically interested so much as you are interested in his interest in and support of you. Actually involving yourself in such a dynamic could take his freedom, as well as your own capacity to learn from your break-up, then find a partner you’re genuinely drawn to for their own merits.   I’m not saying friendship isn’t an important ingredient in love. Many of the most successful, very long-term partners I know have developed a deep friendship with one another. This friendship helps them stay kind to each other and have fun over many years when work, health, or stress can interrupt more passionate times of connection. But those same couples also had the undeniable spark of attraction at the start of their relationships too. They didn’t have to try. Sometimes they tried not to feel as strongly as they did, and still weren’t able to stop.  Even in cases when a relationship first launches platonically, if something more is there, the undeniable, reciprocal pull tends to emerge soon thereafter. In H.G. Wells’ 1911 novel, The New Machiavelli, which was largely based on a real-life affair Wells had, he writes about a college graduate called Richard who meets a young woman, Isabel. The two become friends and are entranced with each other’s minds. But they quickly start to notice more between them, despite trying to push such thoughts away. They fail at this attempt. Richard has a moment of realization, when he turns to look at Isabel’s face one day. “And something — an infinite tenderness, stabbed me,” Wells wrote. “It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. …From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.” I think you owe it to yourself, and your friend, to pursue connections that have this quality, especially at the start.  You should also make room for and appreciate your friendship. If it never becomes romantic, that doesn’t make it a lesser relationship. The couples therapist, Esther Perel, calls friendships their own kind of love story. She once described a simple exercise to help appreciate that bond. Take a few minutes and think about a friend who isn’t a family member or romantic partner. “Recall a time when that friend reflected you back to yourself, created space for joy, or helped you remember who you are,” Perel suggests. Then, send a message to that friend about that moment, and thank them.  Having a good friend by your side in the aftermath of a breakup is a gift. Work on maintaining and nurturing that friendship, and make sure you spend some time helping him with his life too. Don’t fixate on whether you should attempt to fall in love. The truth is, for better or for worse, if you love him, you won’t have to try. Bonus: What I’m reading I’ve always been interested in the history of love, by which I mean the differences over time in how love has been expressed and discussed. William Reddy, a historian of emotion, has an excellent book called The Making of Romantic Love; you can also check out a syllabus for a class at Duke University he taught on the subject.  For a deeper dive (and refresher!) on Plato’s Symposium, I found that there was no better person to turn to than Melvyn Bragg and his guests on the BBC In Our Time episode on the philosophy of love.  Arranged marriages are an interesting window into understanding the growth of love. Mansi Choksi’s nonfiction book, The Newlyweds, follows three couples in India who attempt to marry for love; here’s an excerpt that was published in Harper’s Magazine.

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