This seems insane. Living in shared flats is very common in Germany presumably most of Europe. (I'm not talking about boarding houses.) It's not unheard of for them to include eight otherwise unrelated people (as long as there's enough space for everyone). Living in such a shared flat is basically the norm for college students and a formative experience for most.

It's kinda shocking that this is illegal in some countries otherwise considered "free." Why can I not live together with my friends?

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mothballed 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Because the property-owning voter block are experts at inventing contrived reasons that they pretend to care for the safety of tenants, by implementing policies that drive up rent and property prices by regulating housing into more scarcity. A good way to do this is to start screaming about fires as soon as you start packing more people in, no matter that it comes at the expense of tenants being less to afford medicine, good food, education, childcare and other necessities.

	▲	supertrope 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Mass casualty events get a disproportionate amount of attention. Like the 2016 Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.

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

> Living in shared flats is very common in Germany presumably most of Europe.

It's common in the United States, too.

This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.

Any college town will have houses full of college students. In my experience, the only enforcement actions were when landlords were renting out houses to more people than they had rooms, so they had situations where one person was living in a closet or an attic or other space that doesn't have proper fire egress. They don't mess around with that once it's discovered.

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tomaskafka 3 days ago | parent [-]

> This is one of those weird laws that's on the books but is almost never enforced.

Let me introduce to the concept of rubber laws, a beloved tool of every totalitarian states. I now pass over to GPT:

“Rubber laws are vague catch-all offenses—like old vagrancy or ‘disorderly conduct’ laws on steroids. Because they’re so unclear, authorities can always say you broke one, and they use that flexibility to target inconvenient people. In the U.S., the Supreme Court generally strikes down such vague laws under the void-for-vagueness doctrine—but authoritarian systems keep them precisely because vagueness makes selective enforcement easy.”

	▲	GJim 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I now pass over to GPT Please don't do this. Non-attributed data from LLMs (known for bullshitting) is not helpful.

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

It’s the same in the US in college towns. Many people live in shared housing as you describe. My kids and my nieces and nephews have all done it. But I do recognize the point of the article.

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wil421 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is not illegal. I with 3-4 unrelated people in college from time to time. There was one group that rented a massive house and had 15-20 people living in it.

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xvedejas 3 days ago | parent [-]

I've definitely done it in places (in the US) where locally it was not legal. But it's not like the cops ever checked and caused us trouble about it, so it's easy to get away with it if there aren't other legal issues going on.

	▲	bombcar 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Even where it's not legal, there's often ways around it - if one student is willing to be the "fall guy" so there's only ever one person on the lease. The SRO bans went explicitly against a form of "hotel" really which was more individualistic. An example is seen in Blues Brothers, before Carrie Fischer remodels it; probably to install higher density.