As rents and homelessness climbed in San Diego over the last decade, leaders watched in frustration as affordable housing projects took months to get approved. The longer a project dragged on, the more expensive it became.  

Housing in America is notoriously slow and complicated to build, so San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria decided to use one lever he had available. In January 2023, he signed an executive order to speed up project approvals, so every fully affordable project now had to be reviewed in 30 business days or less.

To meet this new goal, San Diego had to overhaul how it had been handling permitting. The city streamlined work that had been spread across multiple departments and filled positions it had budgeted for but left vacant. Within a year, fully affordable projects were clearing review in nine days on average. Citywide, 2023 marked San Diego’s biggest year for housing permits since at least 2005, with 9,691 homes approved, or an 82 percent jump from the year before.

Austin, Texas embraced a different approach to tackling its housing shortage. After years of local zoning reform, the city legalized up to three homes on most single-family lots in late 2023, then cut the minimum lot size from 5,750 square feet to 1,800 in 2024. Those changes made it easier to add homes, including backyard accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and followed a broader construction boom that has helped bring rents down. Austin, which was becoming increasingly unaffordable, is now one of the few major American cities where asking rents have fallen since the pandemic.

Atlanta adopted a third housing strategy that didn’t require changing any laws at all. Mayor Andre Dickens rallied the heads of every public agency that affects housing, from the city’s housing authority and school system to the transit agency and land bank, and convened them in one room on a regular basis. He called it a “housing strike force” and it has helped advance the city’s broader effort to build or preserve 20,000 affordable homes by 2030. Every housing deal now comes to the mayor’s office, Dickens told me, and “I just start pushing buttons to push them out the door.” 

Seen as a nationwide issue, the housing shortage is an enormously difficult problem, sitting at the nexus of the economy, the financial system, and decades of local zoning decisions. But the fixes don’t all have to be complex. A mayor can do all three of these — faster permitting, ADUs, a housing strike team — without waiting on Congress or their state legislature to act. And now one major nonprofit is betting that other cities could adopt them too.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg Philanthropies is announcing that it will fund up to 30 cities to adopt one of those three housing ideas. Each will get between $450,000 and $750,000 directly and two years of help from Accelerator for America and the digital consultancy Public Digital, also funded by Bloomberg. The philanthropy has already selected the first 15 cities, including Albuquerque, Chattanooga, Cleveland, Durham, Louisville, Miami, Nashville, Pittsburgh, and San Jose.

By housing construction standards, the money doesn’t go very far. The grants are geared toward hiring city staff, buying new software, and helping cities quickly develop the expertise that let San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta do what they did.

“You don’t need everyone to be innovating everything all the time when there are good ideas in the world that are working,” said James Anderson, who leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ government innovation program. “They need help adapting those ideas to local contexts.”

According to Anderson, the cities were chosen because their mayors had already taken hard political votes on zoning, and wanted help now to do more. Their timing is also intentional. On the federal level, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law in July, and it creates competitive grants for cities that modernize their permitting, for preapproved housing plans, and that open up their public land. These are the same reforms Bloomberg is now funding, and cities that can show they’ve already done work around it will be better positioned to tap into new federal dollars.

Mayors say they’ve seen big federal programs pass before and then found that actually leveraging those new funding streams in practice can be quite difficult. “We saw that with the Inflation Reduction Act,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb told me. “Even some of the aspects of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, there was a lot of red tape to get some of that stuff across the finish line.”

The Bloomberg bet is that figuring out what to do isn’t as hard as organizing the knowledge of how to do it. The philanthropy thinks that with enough money and hand-holding, good ideas can spread.

It’s an experiment worth testing, but even at the outset there are real limits to what kind of help a short-term infusion of cash can do in practice. San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta all had substantial housing staff in place before they started, and many cities don’t have the same depth to draw on. A two-year grant covers a few staff roles, but doesn’t guarantee they’ll stay long-term in a city where most of the local budget is already committed.

What a “housing strike force” actually is

Dickens had campaigned for office in Atlanta on building 20,000 affordable units in eight years. When he became mayor in 2022, his staff told him the city was on pace to fall 4,000 to 5,000 units short of this goal, and that the main federal subsidy for affordable housing, which gets rationed out by the state in fixed amounts each year, wasn’t going to make up the difference.

What Atlanta did have was land, spread across more than a dozen public entities, each with its own board and its own ideas about what the land was for. One 10-acre city site just northwest of downtown was being used to store trash cans before delivery to residents. “It’s not the highest and best use of the land, but we’ve been doing it for decades,” Josh Humphries, then Dickens’ senior housing adviser, told The Guardian.

So Dickens pulled the heads of those agencies into one body reporting through his chief housing officer. The transit system and school district both answer to their own boards, so his pitch was that they weren’t giving anything up by getting involved. “You are still in charge of your organization, these are your deals, but we are an accelerator,” Dickens told me.

They spent nothing setting it up and hired no new staff for the strike force itself — though when Dickens advises other mayors, he’s blunter about the pressure a mayor would need to exert in convening such a team. An agency that opts out of participating, he said, is “outside of the scope of the mayor’s vision” and “that’s not a safe place to be.”

“I didn’t need another task force,” Dickens added. “Task forces are good, but we know what we’re doing. We don’t have to describe the task. No, this is a strike force. We know the deals, we have the land, we know where the money is for most of these deals, and we have the political will.”

What Dickens did was create “a horizontal way of organizing otherwise vertical players,” as Anderson of Bloomberg Philanthropies put it.

As part of the strike force, agency leaders meet monthly, and quarterly with the mayor. Each one reports what they will produce in the next 30 days, whether that’s a signed agreement, bank financing, or a permit, in front of everyone else. The goal is to move everything as fast as possible to keep down costs.

“You’re in a meeting with 20 colleagues talking about your four or five projects, and everybody is aware of everybody’s projects,” Dickens said. “You don’t want to come back to that meeting saying nothing happened over the last 30 days.”

The limits of the model

Dickens was fairly blunt about where the model stops working. “It works best in cities that have a sizable amount of competent housing development people,” he told me. “A strike force is Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. You all are capable.” A city still standing up its housing program, he added, should just focus on collaboration, because it would be hard for a small city without “the knowledgeable skills, the capacity” to operate like this.

Most cities can’t easily build that internal bench. Local governments pay less than state or federal employers for the same specialized work, and between half and three-quarters of a typical city’s operating budget is already locked up in salaries, pensions, debt payments, and basic services before the mayor makes a single discretionary call.

In Cleveland, they’re hoping to use the Bloomberg funding to bring in some new support. “Right now it’s a capacity game for us,” Bibb told me. “IT staff, planning staff, development staff, the list goes on. Policy staff as well.”

Cleveland also faces different challenges than Atlanta, which built its strike force for a growth market that already had projects lined up. Cleveland is an older, industrial city with an aging housing stock and a population that has only recently stopped shrinking, so Bibb needs code enforcement and rehab as well as new units. He plans to point the strike force first at a housing innovation district he launched earlier this year, an area spanning parts of three East Side neighborhoods where the city has concentrated its financing and permitting reforms.

Two-year grants can generally be a challenge for cities. Philanthropy often pays for staff long enough to prove a policy works, but when the foundation money goes away, cities can struggle to find the dollars to keep the positions going. While Atlanta’s strike force was organizing around people the city already employed, Cleveland’s will require new ongoing resources for a growing payroll.

Asked what happens when the money runs out, Bibb maintained he’s concentrating on the near term. “Right now we’re just focused on securing the grant, getting the team in place, and really seeing some positive results with the strike force team in our housing innovation district,” he said.

Can a good idea be scaled?

The 30 cities won’t be working alone. Bloomberg is running them as a cohort, meaning each city will pair with the city that pioneered the idea. The goal is to trade advice, mentorship, and opportunities for city leaders to visit and tour. Cleveland is one of roughly 10 cities that will take up the strike force model, meaning Bibb’s team will work with Dickens and his staff.

“One of the major reasons that good ideas do not spread is a lack of clarity around what it took in the original city to get the hard work done,” Anderson said. Adopting cities need to hear from the originals on both a political and a technical level, he told me, to understand “the trade-offs, the costs, the errors, and lessons learned” before they start.

Bloomberg has been testing a version of this model since 2024 through its Idea Exchange, which now includes more than 1,000 cities across 95 countries and has nearly 200 policy replications completed or underway.

Within two years, cities pursuing permitting reform are expected to cut their housing approval timelines in half, those pursuing ADUs to double their pipelines, and participants ultimately to post gains in citywide housing supply.

The housing shortage runs into millions of homes, and these proposed strategies don’t touch challenges like interest rates or the price of lumber. But across the country, they could show how quickly a good idea can spread.

“Do you know who used to live here?” 

Spend enough time living in New York and you’ll inevitably hear that your block, building, or perhaps entire unit used to be the home of a celebrity. These stories become useful to impress out-of-towners (“Did you know Capote and the guy who made Grand Theft Auto lived in the same house?”) or to illustrate gentrification (Jay-Z’s stash spot from “Empire State of Mind” listed for $1.3m). But for Harris Ansari, discovering “what celeb used to live in my apartment” helped him answer another question: “Why does my closet smell like this?” 

In May, newlyweds Harris and Avani moved into their 3-bed 2-bath on Pinehurst Ave in Washington Heights. There was plenty to love about the space: natural light, high ceilings, and ample space for their cat Chutney to explore. One small concern: the floor and baseboards of the guest bedroom closet were caked in a mysterious black substance. 

“My wife made this interesting observation,” said Harris, pointing to the area in question. “She goes, ‘Why does it smell like a farm in here?’”

A born and raised New Yorker, Harris was never going to be scared off a good apartment on smell alone. On move-in day, the couple went to work steam-cleaning the apartment—only to find the heat was amplifying the smell. 

“Chutney [the couple’s cat] was definitely curious,” said Harris. “But I was like, whatever. She’s a dumb cat. Orange.”

“I was trying not to think about it,” said Avani. “But then I found a feather.”

Unfortunately, signs were pointing to the apartment smelling like birds because it once had birds in it. “Maybe not even a full feather, but like… fluff. I just tried to imagine that someone had kept hamsters there or something.”

Days later, a building meet-up with their new neighbors removed “willful ignorance” as an option.

“A new neighbor mentioned, ‘Oh hey, did you know Azealia Banks used to live in the building?’” said Harris. Banks’s blend of ballroom culture, hip-hop, and house music created some of the most enduring mephedrone burp anthems of the 2010s: “212”, “Anna Wintour”, “Big Big Beat”. The revelation piqued Harris’ interest: for one, he was a fan. For another, he had found a promo sticker for Banks’s 2016 mixtape Slay-Z on the inside of his mailbox.

Whoever put it there had the mail key for his unit.

Music aside, Banks is equally known for having a social media presence that necessitates a dedicated Wikipedia section. Among her most memorable posts: a December 30, 2016 video in which she dons goggles and uses a sand-blaster to clean out a carrion-caked closet.

“Three years worth of Brujería,” says Banks in the video, referring to the umbrella term for witchcraft rooted in indigenous Latin American and Afro-Caribbean cultures. “You know I gotta scrape all this shit up.” 

The video indicated that Banks had been using the closet for the sacrifice of live chickens. As an initiate of the African diasporic religion Palo Mayombe (overlapping with, but distinct from Brujería and Santería), the practice was of spiritual importance to Banks. By way of explanation, she tweeted that she made the sacrifices “to help my father (who is dead) out.”

At the time, the video set off an intense online debate. PETA stated that the practice constituted animal cruelty, while others noted that many religions incorporate ritual sacrifice (which is protected under the First Amendment). 

Fast-forward nine years: Harris compared the background of the video (and other livestreams from Banks) to confirm that yes, he did indeed live in Azealia’s former “witch cave.” This may also explain why the iridescent tile in the bathroom matches the album art for Banks’s 2012 Fantasea mixtape. The smoking gun came weeks later: a letter in the mail addressed to Ms. Azealia Banks.

Initially, “it was unsettling to find it out,” said Avani. But a little research and open-mindedness helped them reach closure. 

“We went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole,” said Avani, which yielded the info that Brujeria sacrifices are usually done for the benefit of someone in the afterlife. “When [Harris] said she did it for good fortune, I relaxed a bit. She wasn’t invoking anything evil here.” 

The logistics of Banks’s rituals did draw some questions from Harris: “In my research, there’s nothing in Brujería that says you don’t have to clean up after your sacrifices, and to do it in one’s home as opposed to outdoors. That’s interesting.”

Harris was also quick to acknowledge that interpretations of his own faith (Islam) can involve elements of animal sacrifice. “Initially, when you hear the word ‘sacrifice’, people go to a place of satanic panic,” he said. “But I would never be the one to judge someone’s spiritual practice. If sacrificing chickens brings you closer to who or what you believe created us, power to you. People did hit me up on Instagram saying that I had to get my home blessed, but it’s not as if she was trying to summon something evil, right? I believe that whatever energy someone gives off, they take it with them. So there was no real concern from me.” 

“In most New York City apartments, you have the luxury of not knowing what happened there,” Avani shrugged. “But in all likelihood, something you’d rather not know about did.” 

“Probably won’t tell my mom,” added Harris. 

Follow Eamon Levesque on Instagram @eamonomania

The post We Just Moved Into the Azealia Banks Animal Sacrifice Apartment appeared first on VICE.

The Soviet Union famously churned out tens of thousands of new apartment buildings in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s — some assembled in as little as 12 days — together comprising tens of millions of individual apartments. Such speed is not unique to communist command economies, or even to grim concrete mega-blocks. In Sweden and Japan today, modern, high-quality new homes can be factory-built and assembled in a matter of weeks using the same basic method — prefabrication — as the Soviets.

The US, alas, evinces no such urgency to build housing. 

In some of our highest-cost cities — San Francisco, New York, Miami — it takes, somewhat astonishingly, nearly five years to erect a modestly sized apartment building, from the time an application is first submitted to building completion. That was one of the top-line findings of a remarkable new economics working paper on housing construction timelines across 60 US cities. The gaps between the fastest and slowest cities were just as striking: In Raleigh, North Carolina, a builder can complete a 20-unit apartment building in about as much time as it takes just to approve the permit for one in San Francisco, where applications languish for more than a year. In Indianapolis, a single-family home can be built in six months from proposal to completion, less than one-eighth the time it takes in San Francisco.

Such delays have costs — in delayed housing supply at a time when America is millions of homes in the hole, in lost staff time that developers ultimately bake into the cost of the new homes, and in homes that simply never get built because the process is discouraging to anyone but the best-resourced developers. The authors, Leonardo D’Amico, Evan Soltas, and Audrey Wang, found that longer permitting lengths are correlated with higher housing prices and lower rates of housing production, though they don’t claim to have shown that these are causal relationships. The research (which has not yet been through peer review and, like any working paper, may be revised before final publication) represents the first such comprehensive dataset comparing homebuilding timelines across the US. To build it, the researchers assembled 1.1 million permits covering 2.7 million housing units between 2000 and 2025 — about one in 13 new homes permitted nationally over that period, they write. 

It probably won’t come as a shock to you that housing can be built faster in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, than in Los Angeles or pretty much anywhere in California. But perhaps the most notable takeaway (to me, anyway) from the paper was how massively home permitting times have lengthened across the board over the past 25 years. Across the cities in their sample, the researchers estimate that permitting time for a standardized multifamily building rose from 0.6 years in 2000 to 1.5 years in 2023, and, for a single-family home, from 1.6 months in 2000 to 4.9 months in 2023. 

Is there really any good reason why we should take nearly a year longer to approve an apartment building than, Soltas joked in a recent interview, “the barbarians of 2006”? Shouldn’t we be getting faster and more efficient at building housing over time, not slower — especially at a time of acute housing scarcity? 

You would think. So what is going on here?

One building, very different wait times

Permitting refers to everything that happens after a developer submits an application to build a house or multifamily building, before they’re allowed to break ground. The proposal is then reviewed for compliance with a range of different sets of rules, from building safety and energy codes to plumbing to zoning and, in some places, aesthetic design. Initial applications will often be found noncompliant and then sent back to the builder for revisions, Soltas, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton, told me.  

The gulf between housing starts in California and Texas has become something of a meme in housing abundance circles. But, for all that, we have until now lacked rigorous apples-to-apples comparisons of permitting and building times in different metro areas, Soltas said. That gap in seemingly basic knowledge, what should be “step zero” facts for the national housing reform debate, became apparent to him when he was teaching an urban economics class, which became one of the impetuses for the new paper. “I realized if I needed that information to teach my students, that it might be useful for other people,” he said. 

Rather than merely pulling permits from different cities and comparing how long whatever happened to be built in each city took to approve, the researchers used the data to estimate how long an identical, standardized project would take in each place between 2015 and 2019, keeping constant its size and the density of the surrounding neighborhood. Their uniform archetypes were a 2,800-square-foot detached single-family home on a 0.15-acre lot and a 20-unit multifamily building with 1,200 square feet per apartment.

Cities with longer permitting times also tended to have longer construction periods — the longer it takes to get an application approved, the longer it then takes to do the building itself, which compounds the gap between the fastest- and slowest-building cities (it’s possible that “cities that make the permitting process difficult also put in lots of burdens that slow the construction process,” Soltas said). One advantage of the researchers’ method is that the differences across cities can’t merely be chalked up to something like the complexity of building within already-dense environments like Manhattan — the analysis already controls for that. So the enormous gaps between different places become harder to dismiss as inevitable features of development in big cities.

The study wasn’t designed to answer the “why” of it all — those will be questions for future research. “Our paper doesn’t directly identify any smoking guns,” Soltas said. Still, some of the culprits are likely obvious — California, for example, has long subjected some housing projects to extensive environmental review requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Apartment buildings, especially larger ones, are more likely to have to go through CEQA review, though they’re more environmentally friendly than single-family homes (recognizing this as an obstacle to housing affordability, California has been moving to exempt many housing projects from such reviews). 

Why are we taking so much longer to permit housing?

But why, as the study finds, is permitting becoming slower across the country, not just in the most regulated cities? “We estimate that, in 2000, our standardized multi-family project had a 71-percent probability of approval within six months of applying for a permit,” the researchers write. “In 2025, that project had a 44-percent approval probability within six months.” Permitting times have come down a bit since 2023, but it’s unclear whether that just represents the reversal of pandemic-era highs, or if it reflects real progress from the pro-housing policies that have been passed in many cities and states in recent years. 

That discovery dovetails with other economics research finding that zoning codes, which were first widely adopted in the US in the early-to-mid 20th century, have continued to become more restrictive even in recent years, making it harder to build housing. 

Without knowing why exactly permitting lengths have ballooned, it’s hard to say whether those increases have occurred for good reasons. At least some of it may have to do with the aforementioned intensification of zoning and other land-use restrictions, which, I can say from having written a lot about zoning, tend to be pretty ill-conceived and hard to justify. 

The slowdown may also be connected to expanding building code requirements. I’ve written at length about that issue, too; although ever-more stringent rules might seem like a great idea — who could be opposed to more safety? — they tend to be biased against multi-family housing and likely inflate the cost of building, all without having to show that the benefits are worth the costs. Particularly the cost in housing supply that never gets built, which has the effect of keeping more Americans living in older housing stock. And do we really think a home built to 2005 standards is dangerously subpar today?  

We might ultimately decide that many of today’s building requirements — particularly ones like stronger energy efficiency standards — are worth it, but first we’d need to determine what their full costs are, which we remain far from doing. 

At a minimum, it seems unlikely that an apartment building that’s okay to build in Grand Rapids today would be unsafe for New York. So what, exactly, is all that extra permitting time buying the city? Now, at least, Mayor Zohran Mamdani can put an exact number on the delay. 

Todd Waller wasn’t expecting to spend the latter half of his 30s living with roommates. But in late 2022, following a breakup with his girlfriend, he needed to find a new place to live, quickly. 

A social worker based in the Atlanta metro, Waller started googling “efficiency apartments” and stumbled onto an ad for PadSplit, a company founded in 2017 that lets property owners rent out individual furnished bedrooms in single-family homes by the week. “It said I could get approved right away and move in tomorrow,” he recalled. There was no security deposit required.

All of a sudden, Waller found himself living with six other people and able to save a lot of money. His rent was just $180 per week, or less than $800 per month. Though he earned a decent salary, he never really had anything left over after all his bills were paid, and the new financial breathing room made the tradeoff of housemates feel worth it.

After a while, Waller decided he would be willing to upgrade to a nicer PadSplit unit, one with more amenities but still with roommates. Now he pays $1,250 a month to live on one side of a 2,000-square-foot home, with access to his own private bathroom, a private entrance, and a renovated kitchen. Three other people live on the other side of the house, and he rarely interacts with them.

“My house is awesome; I pay $500 less a month than I would if I were renting [a place of my own] without roommates, and I just was able to buy a new car,” he told me. He knows one day he’ll move somewhere else and perhaps even buy his own home, but he likes that he feels he can make that decision comfortably at his own pace.

With rents outpacing wages in most of the country, legislators are increasingly looking at co-living — sometimes called house-sharing or adult dorm rooms — as an overlooked piece of America’s housing stock. Zillow counts roughly 21 million “empty nest households” — or homes where older residents living with no children have at least two extra bedrooms. Some lawmakers want to make it easier for those homeowners to rent them out, which could put workers closer to their jobs and help seniors stay in houses they can no longer afford alone. Others are eyeing a different kind of vacancy: Post-pandemic remote work has left about a fifth of American office space empty, and there’s growing interest in turning some of it into apartments. 

Many advocates for people experiencing homelessness also argue that co-living is a needed solution, something that could help people going through emergencies avoid the scary slide into shelter living, especially models where you can move in almost immediately and without a deposit. PadSplit surveyed its renters in December and found a population that mostly works (83 percent were employed) and mostly hadn’t been to college. The median income was $32,500.

That co-living needs advocates at all is a legacy of the last century. Renting a single room in a boarding house or residential hotel was once an ordinary way to live in an American city, but in the decades after World War II those rooms became shorthand for poverty and vice, and cities responded by banning new ones and paying landlords to get rid of the old. Half a century later, many people still see sharing space with strangers as a last resort, or feel embarrassed about having roommates past a certain age. And discriminatory zoning codes written in that era are still on the books in most communities, enforcing traditional nuclear family arrangements when it comes to single-family housing, by defining “family” as people related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Those rules can be wielded against home-sharing, and against specific renters neighbors want to keep out.

But these longstanding barriers are starting to finally give. Doubling up with people you aren’t related to is less unusual than it used to be. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of households sharing space with nonrelatives grew by more than 500,000. Lawmakers desperate for anything that adds more housing supply also seem less picky about where it comes from. Companies like PadSplit are putting private capital behind the model, and a wave of new laws and litigation — much of it led by conservative legal groups arguing on property-rights grounds — is making it harder for cities to tell homeowners who can and cannot sleep in their spare rooms. 

For the first time since cities banned cheap rooms, the people trying to bring them back have the momentum, and the next couple of years will go a long way toward deciding whether co-living stays a niche workaround for people like Waller or becomes something a lot more people are able to consider.

The return of SROs

At the turn of the 20th century, as American cities swelled, immigrants, day laborers, and factory workers crowded into downtowns looking for somewhere cheap and temporary to sleep. A small room could be rented by the day, the week, or however long someone needed it. Some “boarded” in private homes while others took beds in bottom-rung hotels known as flophouses. These arrangements varied widely, but became broadly known as single-room occupancies (SROs).

The turn against them came after World War II, as middle-class white families decamped for roomy new houses in the suburbs, and SROs grew more closely associated with shoddy housing for the poor and the deviant. New York and other cities started banning SRO construction in the 1950s. By the 1970s, SROs were a regular media villain, even as they still housed hundreds of thousands of people, including the mentally ill who had been turned out by the closing of state asylums. Cities started to offer landlords incentives to convert their SROs into luxury rentals. Between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, roughly a million of these affordable market-rate units disappeared from the market across the country.

The idea that perhaps cities made a mistake in banning these lower-cost housing options has been simmering in urbanist policy circles for the last 15 years, particularly as the homelessness crisis has gotten worse. The Furman Center at NYU argued in 2018 that reintroducing SROs could help address the housing shortage. The architecture critic Karrie Jacobs argued in 2021 that cities had blamed a kind of housing for problems that belonged to the people living in it. “The notion took hold that if you eliminated the housing, the marginal people would simply vanish,” she wrote in Curbed.

Still, lawmakers have dragged their feet on actually making it easier to rent these kinds of units again, and until recently the people pushing for it had little to show beyond op-eds and white papers. What’s different now is that the fight has moved out of the world of policy papers and into places where it can produce actual results, including a lawsuit that could reach the Supreme Court.

Suing over who counts as family

In early 2022, a home-sharing startup called HomeRoom was renting out two houses in Shawnee, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. The company rented rooms one at a time to unrelated adults who wanted cheaper housing, and at a local city council meeting that year, Shawnee’s community development director asked whether the city should support such arrangements in single-family neighborhoods at all. Two months later, the council passed an ordinance banning “co-living groups,” which it defined as four or more unrelated adults sharing a home. 

Under the ordinance, if even one adult in a house wasn’t related to the others by blood, marriage, or adoption, the whole household counted as unrelated.

While the new law forced HomeRoom to evict its tenants, it also put Val French, a Shawnee homeowner, in a bad situation. She lived with her husband, their two adult sons, and one son’s girlfriend. Because the girlfriend was related to no one, the house was now deemed in violation of the city’s occupancy rules. Her son and his girlfriend had to move out, and French couldn’t rent the empty room to anyone else.

French and HomeRoom sued in federal court in May 2023, with assistance from the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. They argued that their right to choose who they live with is protected under the 14th Amendment, but they ran into legal precedent from a 1974 Supreme Court case, Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, which upheld a Long Island village’s nearly identical rule against six college students sharing a house.

The decision came down in the same years cities were clearing out their SROs, and it has given local governments cover to decide who counts as a family ever since.

A federal judge dismissed the Shawnee suit in September 2023, citing Belle Terre, and this past April the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the dismissal. A few months later, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case and reconsider Belle Terre once and for all. The precedent has already frayed in places — state courts in California, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have struck down local “unrelated occupants” limits under their own laws — but it still governs everywhere else. 

There is “a fundamental liberty right to choose household living companions — whether as an articulation of the right of intimate association or independently — that is deeply rooted in American history and tradition,” PLF’s lead attorney on the case, David Deerson, told me. 

The Supreme Court hears only about 1 percent of the cases it’s asked to take, and even if it took this one, the plaintiffs would be asking a conservative majority to recognize a new constitutional right, which that majority has spent the past few years insisting courts should almost never do. 

Deerson’s argument is aimed at that skepticism, though. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it held that an unwritten right counts only if it is “deeply rooted in history and tradition.” Deerson and his allies are arguing that living with people you aren’t related to qualifies as such because, for most of American history, boarding houses and lodgers were typical staples of family life. Belle Terre is also a short opinion written by William O. Douglas, a liberal justice whose legacy has little connection to today’s conservative justices. 

The legislative front

A Supreme Court reversal would be the cleanest fix for co-living, but advocates aren’t waiting on it. State legislatures have already shown they’ll act: Iowa barred cities from enforcing relationship-based occupancy limits in 2017, Oregon and Washington followed in 2021, and in 2024, Colorado lawmakers passed a law prohibiting cities from restricting how many unrelated roommates can live under one roof absent a clear health or safety reason. 

The Pacific Legal Foundation worked on that last bill too, and has since turned it into model legislation for other states. They colloquially call it the “Golden Girls bill” since occupancy caps like these would have prevented the four unrelated women of the hit 1980s sitcom from sharing a house. 

This year Pennsylvania lawmakers introduced their own version, with supporters citing not private property rights but the potential to ease the state’s affordable housing shortage. As legislators considered the proposal, Pacific Legal Foundation published research showing that nine of the 10 most populous cities in Pennsylvania capped the number of unrelated adults who could live together. The state House passed the Golden Girls bill this summer, though the Pennsylvania Senate version has not yet received a vote. 

The objection lawmakers hear most is the same one that animated Belle Terre — that lifting occupancy caps could turn quiet, orderly, neighborhood homes into de facto frat houses. That college partying concern killed Connecticut’s proposed Golden Girls bill this year. While the bill cleared the state Senate, it never got a vote in the House, amid reported concerns from the speaker about college students moving into wealthy neighborhoods. “What if a neighbor is unhappy about four unrelated people who are 19 years old or 22 years old living in the house?” state House Speaker Matt Ritter asked in an interview with the Connecticut Mirror. 

Pennsylvania’s sponsors tried to head off those fears by amending the bill to exclude protections where someone is enrolled at a college or university. In other words, the law would have covered Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia from Golden Girls unless one of them signed up for a class at their community college.

Nevertheless, advocates are expanding their push. Jim Manley, state policy director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, told me he expects Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Utah to take up new versions of the legislation in 2027.

And occupancy caps aren’t the only co-living target. Sam Hooper, a lawyer who has been lobbying state legislatures to re-legalize SROs, and his former colleagues at the Institute for Justice are now focused on the ROOM Act, model legislation that would bar cities from restricting SROs and other co-living arrangements, including rules that make it hard to convert offices into apartments. A version was first introduced in Rhode Island earlier this year. 

For Meagan Forbes, Institute for Justice’s director of legislation, the goal is for co-living to be treated like any other form of housing. “Other local laws can regulate things like noise and fire safety, but current regulations just go way too overboard in preventing this kind of housing,” she told me. 

Hooper, who drafted the ROOM Act, says he wanted to “take a massive sledgehammer” to existing restrictions. The resistance he runs into isn’t only the frat-house worry, but older cultural fears that SROs would recreate the poor tenement conditions of the early 20th century. “I think there’s this real problem of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in housing policy,” he told me. “People accuse us of wanting people to live in undignified housing, but they just struggle to understand that it can be a perfectly fine option for many people at different points in their life.” Hooper credits his own London co-living experience in his 20s with introducing him to some of his best friends and his wife. 

Even so, he cited a broad political coalition backing him up, from property rights champions in conservative states to Democrats and progressive YIMBYs drawn to the housing justice and homelessness angles. There are business leaders interested in workforce housing, he said, and he noted that the AARP testified for the ROOM Act in Rhode Island. “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to keep this bipartisan coalition that hasn’t succumbed to the culture wars,” Hooper added.

Not every co-living proposal is about removing rules. DC’s Senior Co-Living Program Establishment Act, also nicknamed the Golden Girls bill, would pay senior homeowners $300 a month to rent a room to another senior, plus up to $2,500 for home modifications. 

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the federal housing package that became law in July, doesn’t touch occupancy rules. But it does fund a pilot program for converting vacant commercial buildings into housing, which could make adult dorm office conversions easier.

The demand question

While momentum for co-living is real, demand is also complicated. Americans are doubling up more than they were before the pandemic — about 8.2 million households in 2024, up 4.3 percent since 2019, according to analysis shared by Zillow. Yet the share made up of unrelated adults living together actually fell slightly, by roughly 50,000 households, while homes shared with couples or families grew by nearly 400,000. In other words, when Americans need to save on rent, they still mostly turn to people they already know.

PadSplit is betting that changes. Atticus LeBlanc recently announced his company is expanding into New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, three of the most expensive rental markets in the country.

“Does that mean things have gotten more desperate, that it’s forcing this cultural acceptance?” he asked me in an interview. “I think there’s certainly an argument to be made there. But you could just as easily make the argument that, holy cow, we are really, really wasteful with space.”