The City Council of Shawnee, KS has taken it upon themselves to dictate how many non-familial people can occupy a single-family home. Last year the city council unanimously voted to amend their municipal code (specifically Chapter 17) by changing the definition of family to no more than 3 unrelated adults in a single housekeeping unit. The amendment prohibits 4 or more unrelated adults from living in a single-family house, homeowners from renting their house to four or more unrelated adults, and families from taking in three unrelated adults or from a household having a mix of three related adults and three unrelated adults with an exemption for qualified group homes. Ostensibly, the city council consists of well off homeowners who don’t have to worry about trivial things like rent burden and believe their ordinance only impedes one property management company in particular, HomeRoom, Inc, from buying single family houses to rent to multiple tenants who aren’t a family, but as has been pointed out the new ordinance would make the fictional household of The Golden Girls illegal along with four college friends (the University of Missouri -KC is just 9 miles away), or two unmarried couples who may or may not be students or just four graduates who can’t afford to buy or rent on their own like 32% of U.S. adults who live with roommates. The absurdity of extending their police powers to regulate land use to dictate who people are allowed to live with has made the City of Shawnee a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit, HomeRoom, Inc. vs. City of Shawnee, taken up by the Pacific Legal Foundation on a pro bono basis.
To compound their belligerence, the City Council has ensured that most of their residential land is R1 zoned (areas in yellow) with a minimum floor space requirement of 1,100 square feet for single family detached houses. So if you can only afford a 1,000, 900, or 800 square foot adobe, mobile home, or tiny house of 400 square feet or less the city council tells you to go fuck yourself and be poor somewhere else. The city also imposes a 900 square foot per unit floor space requirement on duplexes (also in Chapter 17 of their municipal code), and a 450 square foot minimum floorspace requirement on apartments creating artificial scarcity even in multifamily housing. The city uses almost every tactic in the book to make housing scarce including minimum off street parking requirements of 2 parking spaces per unit. Parking spots consume an estimated 7% of urban footprints in the US, more than the amount of land dedicated to parks, with an average of 2.2 parking spots per registered vehicle. Much of our housing scarcity would probably not exist if we didn’t need cars to travel around our sprawling urban hellscapes, but real estate speculation and city planning commissions have made that inevitable.