The amount of people in a boarding house or shared occupancy is low enough that they can easily be all mutually trusted friends or acquaintances to one another. Why should people be forced by law to admit strangers that they might not be fully comfortable with into that kind of tightly-knit arrangement?

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alistairSH 3 days ago | parent [-]

In a true boarding house, the landlord/owner controls who lives there - each room is rented individually. Individual tenants have zero control over who lives in the next room.

But, yes, if you have a typical shared home, where 4 people get together and rent a home at once, yes, you do have that control (and should have it).

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bilbo0s 3 days ago | parent [-]

Actually, if they rent the home, then they still don't have that control. The landlord does. S/he is free to put someone you don't like in the upstairs unit. Or even in the 5th bedroom of the house if it's a room letting type situation.

No matter what. You rent? Yeah, sorry. The landlord makes the rules.

The hypothetical foursome would need to purchase their property. At that point, they would be able to control for who could live there.

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SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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bilbo0s 3 days ago | parent [-]

Material point is that people are misapprehending the direction of control here.

The tenants have zero control.

The only people allowed to reside at the property, are people the landlord has allowed to do so. Those approved residents are not allowed to then decide to allow different people to reside at the property. Even new tenants sought out in an attempt to sublease, will have to be endorsed by the landlord. Not the current tenants.

People on this thread appear to believe tenants get these rights. No. Tenants get a different set of rights. They can decide who they want to live with. But they cannot decide who they want to live with in a given landlord's house. The landlord gets the right to decide who can reside at the property. Full stop. That the tenants believe X is a great guy is irrelevant to the deliberations of the vast majority of landlords. If you insist on living with X, then you'll have to find another property to rent if X is not agreeable to the landlord.

And the law backs up the landlord's dispassionate disposition on approving residents.

Basically you can choose your roommates, and you are then constrained in the places you're allowed to reside. That constraint being only those places willing to accept all of your roommates.

	▲	coryrc 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Those approved residents are not allowed to then decide to allow different people to reside at the property. Even new tenants sought out in an attempt to sublease, will have to be endorsed by the landlord. Not the current tenants. Depends on what your lease says. The owner can give that option. The landlord cannot legally give you the right to weigh in on a separate lease (SRO) if you'll make decisions using a protected class (i.e. you only want a particular sex in the SRO).
	▲	rexarex 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Depends on where and local laws. In San Francisco you can swap roommates out one for one and they landlord can not reasonably stop you. They can request an application if they want but they can’t reject them unless they have a very good reason. Most landlords don’t bother to waste their time.
	▲	alistairSH 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yeah, you're being way more pedantic than I was a few posts up. My point was only that in an SRO/boarding house situation, the tenant has no control, and at any given point in time, the tenant in the next room could change. And in a shared home "joint and several" lease situation, the tenants control who can live in the home at the beginning of the lease (but, yes, they're effectively locked into that arrangement for the duration of the lease). Yes, in both cases, the landlord generally has more power than the tenants. That wasn't my point.
	▲	SoftTalker 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		As a practical matter, the landlord will be happy to lease to any group of people who all want to live with each other and who are financially qualified to pay the rent. And if the landlord is being selective on the basis of race or other protected class, that's flat-out illegal.