It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.

Like I can see why life in a house with 5 people might in some ways be more difficult than life in a house with 4 or 3, but I don't see why it should be illegal. People can think about these things for themselves and decide what works for them.

Sure, most houses won't accommodate 5 roommates, but there also a lot of extremely large houses in this country. Is there any benefit at all to having some weird, arbitrary 4 person cap? Like a cap per area of space might make sense, but just a limit of 4 regardless of anything?

Everything in the US is legally regulated to such an absurd degree. Where I live a gym needs a certain number of parking spaces per square feet. A clothing store needs a different number. A restaurant yet another different number. A business needs to have electrical outlets every so many feet. Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need? No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.

I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom" (because that's super effective).

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antisthenes 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.

It's not a set number...Municipalities can set this as low as 2 or as high as whatever.

As to why - go and ask them? Presumably it's what the local voters wanted, or at least the most vocal ones that cared to show up to council meetings and such.

> I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom"

Chesterton's Fence.

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alistairSH 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree - I only meant reasonable in relation to typical home sizes.

If there's a grand old 6 bedroom house in a downtown area, it would probably make sense to allow 6 unrelated tenants. My only concern there would be homeowners subdividing rooms ad infinitum to get more tenants. But, there are probably solutions to that that don't involve arbitrary caps on household size.

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jaredklewis 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, like I mentioned in my post above it could be based on square feet. Or the number of toilets. Or bedrooms with windows. Or any number of other things and I would be sympathetic.

It just drives me nuts that the average local politician doesn't seem to care about carefully designing regulations or pruning back the near endless stack of existing, poorly design regulations. We've been stacking stupid on stupid for more than 100 years and it makes doing anything in the real world (building a house, running a local business, etc...) pointlessly tortuous.

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coryrc 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or, you could let people decide how large a bedroom they are willing to rent and stop micromanaging/over-regulating every bit of real estate, which is why the costs are too high.

	▲	supertrope 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The original intent of such regulations was not having tenements where people would perish in event of a fire. In 2016 36 people died in the Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.

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SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Normally the rules for minimum square footage for a "bedroom" and the requirement for a window would limit the amount of internal room dividing that could happen.

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SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The electrical outlet requirement is for fire prevention, to reduce the use of long extension cords and people using multi-outlet adaptors.

The parking thing I agree with. If you want to try to run a retail business without parking, good luck but you should not be prohibited from doing it.

	▲	jaredklewis 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, I didn't know the origin, that's interesting. I'm still very skeptical of the rule. There are other fire safety rules in the US that are considered sacred, like residential buildings more than three floors having multiple staircases, but these building codes don't exist in Japan or Europe and fire deaths per capita are just about the same. Meanwhile, it significantly increases the cost of building housing in the US. I imagine there are lots of places without this socket rule, and if some economist would look at the rates of electrical fires between these places, that would be amazing. I just hate this pattern of regulation in general. Step 1: identify problem (some building materials can cause cancer). Step 2: Come up with some countermeasure (put a sign on every building saying that the building materials might cause cancer). And then they stop. They forgot step 3! Step 3: Check if your countermeasure actually did anything useful! Did cancer rates go down after prop 65? Yes, but when when you control for smoking rates, no, the effect of prop 65 seems to be nothing.
	▲	alistairSH 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It might actually do better with less parking... as that can lead to a more pleasurable pedestrian experience. Of course, that requires a certain level of density and proximity to housing (or common/shared parking). But, generally, parking feels like something "the market" would solve pretty well sans regulation.

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3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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duped 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need?

The last people I expect to know how much of a resource they need are small business owners. Parking regulations are there when there isn't sufficient street or garage parking. It should be obvious that a restaurant needs more parking spots than say, a dry cleaner, so they shouldn't have the same burden. Parking capacity is inelastic, so if you under build then businesses and traffic suffer. Meanwhile if you overbuild, you're stuck maintaining empty parking lots and have inefficient use of space. It makes a ton of sense to me for this to be tightly regulated.

> No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.

I mean if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers. The outlet stuff comes from building codes like the IBC which is widely used (and as the saying goes, written in blood).

As always when you have a beef with your local government the solution is to get involved instead of complaining on the internet. The barrier to entry is shockingly low.

	▲	lazyasciiart 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers Unfortunately parking mandates and other building regulations are often set directly by politicians. There was some interesting insight into the political input to Seattle’s proposed planning updates last year - https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/16/planners-proposed-big...