I do agree that one contributor to the housing crisis in many areas is the lack of SRO and boarding houses, which used to be much more common at least in urban areas. Those are all largely gone now, and they used to be common entry-level housing options for young singles.

If I owned a house would I object to the neighbor taking in a boarder or two? No, but I could see being unhappy about them moving out and turning the house into an SRO rental, especially if those tenants created a nuisance in the neighborhood. Same as a problematic Air BnB.

I think a good compromise might be allowing SRO/boarding if the owner also lives in the house. That is what my town is discussing for at least some residential neighborhoods.

SROs should also be more often allowed in already multifamily/high density residental areas.

> Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.

Property owners are absolutely entitled to their property but that also includes things like noise, sanitation, and crime. It's called an HOA or a master planned community and approximately 30% of the US population lives in one.

Few people like HOAs but still engage in them despite all the downsides because they specifically don't want to live in high density housing where people are packing 10 or 15 unrelated people to a house, inviting crime, noise, sanitary issues, and all the other negatives of high density housing.

Property owners absolutely are entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density, and I say this as someone who also has done similar work to you.

If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.

> Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.

Of course they're entitled to stop efforts to change the world around them. If you moved into a neighborhood with a minimum lot size was X acres, it's a reasonable expectation that it remains as such. If someone comes along and not only wants to change that, but also build multi unit apartment complexes across the street from you, why should you not have a say? Clearly the person was not allowed to do that before changing the zoning rules so why can't I try to stop them from changing them at all?

There's nothing racist about wanting to live a quiet suburban or rural life where you can neither see nor hear the next house over.

> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design

Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.

>Single family zoning was invented with the Chinese in mind.

And who was the "no mobile homes" addendum written for?

You're using "racist = bad" as an excuse to avoid evaluating the premise of the law, which itself is bad too. It doesn't matter that the law is racist. There are tons and tons of areas in the zoning code that are just as bad because they inherent from the same premise of micromanagement, not being racially motivated doesn't make them good. The whole race thing is a red herring.

>This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism.

Regardless of exactly which laws were passed to make living the "wrong" way hard for which demographics the fact of the matter is that race-baiting is purely a distraction and manipulative debate tactic here. The laws are bad on a fundamental level. To use "law is racist, therefore bad" is to engage in a logical slight of hand to avoid the question "if it's bad for municipalities to regulate in this manner why ought states be allowed to do it". Most local zoning codes, if not evaluated by a judicial system highly biased toward the government, would fail the Penn Central test in many places. Simply porting that level of micromanagement to the state level and then scaling it back from 11 to 7 doesn't make the fundamental premise of what's going on here (the government essentially taking land via regulation, to the detriment of owners and communities in the longer term) any less odious. Yeah, not cranking it to 11 does mostly solve it in the moment, but that's like replacing an bad king with a benevolent one. This just isn't an area the government ought to be regulating to the degree that it is. Yeah there's some extreme examples (toxic waste dumps and whatnot) but neither state nor local nor federal government has any business telling people where they can't put apartments or warehouses or other mild things like that.

These laws are bad because the government has no legitimate authority to micromanage the housing stock (and other things) on the fine grained level it does. The sum total of regulations effectively amount to a taking without compensation. They might also be racist in some cases, but that's on top of an already flawed premise.

>You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things

No, I'm saying this in reply to someone who's pretending to want to deregulate but simply wants to regulate in a different way. It's a more permissive way and an overall improvement but the premise is still flawed. Having state regulation that says municipalities can't zone away X, Y and Z simply moves the bickering over minutia from the town hall to the state legislature. It's like adding more and more rules to a geocentric solar system model. You'll get better and better but it's still not right at its core.

That is a different point not related.

A black family or single person could not live in that location. We are talking about 4 unrelated people.

Just for curiosity's sake, when you talk about Italians being widely considered white what context is that in? Because you later talk about anti-Irish racism in the US in the 20s and 30s and the experience was pretty similar for Italians in the US in that time period as well. I have living relatives that can give you firsthand accounts of open, organized, violent anti-Italian racism in Pittsburgh pre-mid WWII.

If a group of tenants and the landlord all sign a "joint and several" lease for a house or multibedroom apartment, nobody can make changes until that lease agreement expires (at least not without the agreement of everyone on the lease).

If it's an SRO lease where they are leasing just a single room and access to common areas then yes the landlord can lease rooms as he can find tenants for them.

> How does social media solve the issue?

Huh? Who said anything about social media? Churches and other religious organizations are basically designed to promote and foster these kinds of in-group relationships.

> Landlords can't advertise racist/sexist whole-unit housing. Primary tenants shouldn't be allowed to advertise racist/sexist housing either.

It would be very strange to tell someone they can’t decide their own roommate because their selection would be “racist/sexist.” I’m trying to imagine how you would even go about enforcing that at the individual level. Is your plan to assign housing randomly with some centralized lottery system? Extract affadavits from prospective tenants?

Do you believe it’s sexist for a heterosexual woman to use a dating website to look for a husband and not a wife? I don’t see why your logic wouldn’t apply there.