This has been a continued bugbear on my housing hunt for years, now. So many townhomes, condos, townships, and communities arbitrarily limiting who I can share my space with, even as a full-time owner-occupant of that space. It’s particularly brutal for the LGBTQ+ community because so many of us find our happiness in “found families” which often aren’t related by blood or marriage and thus can be evicted or fined by an HOA or condo board.

Every affordable home I find inevitably has language that precludes buyers like me from owning it unless I’m willing to live alone or get married, and I’m just not willing to screw over friends like that. Thus, we rent instead of buy a starter condo and begin building equity.

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lazide 3 days ago | parent [-]

Hmm, can you give some locations? At least in CA, I saw limits on max number of adults, but never any specification of the relationships of the adults. That was a pretty liberal area though.

It was mostly to stop the ‘10 adults to a house’ type situations that overwhelms street parking, sewage systems, etc. when everyone is doing it.

	▲	stego-tech 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is in MA. Several townships still have laws on the books about occupant relations and limits, and all but one condo complex I’ve looked at units in had language in their covenants about occupant relations. Realtors countered that these sections aren’t actively enforced anymore, or that the Supreme Judicial Court issued a ruling saying they’re null and void, and that was sometimes (but not always) true. Even so, their existence alone creates the potential for lawfare that a new homeowner just cannot afford, and so we had to pass on them due to that risk assessment. That’s what I’d like more people to understand: even if those rules or laws aren’t enforced now, doesn’t mean they can’t be enforced later when the regime changes its priorities.