Everyone,
I understand the reasons for maximum occupancy rules but -honestly- the bar has been set far too low.
I have a group of friends living near to me in NorthEast who could not afford apartments or homes near their jobs short of living together in a single home. There are five of them, unrelated, and they only do this because they cannot afford to live most places given housing costs and rent.
They can afford about $275 a month. That's it.
They don't have wild parties, they're a bunch of geeks who met through college and the Internet, and their idea of a "huge gathering" is either Thanksgiving with friends or a bi-weekly game of "Dungeons & Dragons."
To pass an ordinance trying to keep family units below 40, 30, 20, or even 10 non-related members is understandable for purposes of cleanliness, noise, and other such concerns, to restrict it to the levels where it now exists is just discriminating against the poor.
Sure, they might be able to find somewhere else to live: some place with a higher crime rate, poor bus transportation, or a 2-3 hour commute, but they shouldn't be nosed out of a place they managed to pull together in a modern display of family-building. These people, whether or not they are recognized by law or religion, are a family: they built their relationships themselves and are constructive parts of their neighborhood.
The ordinances need to be fixed.
I, myself, have lived in those circumstances. I have lived in a rented room in a home occupied by more people than who could legally live there for financial reasons.
To think that law-abiding citizens in such situations could be tossed out of their homes, no matter how conventional and supportive of their community, is unthinkable. It's a bad policy and should end, immediately.
Yours, David J Rust NorthEast Minneapolis
On Mar 15, 2005, at 3:21 AM, wmmarks wrote:
Dave Carlson wrote:
During the late 80s and early 90s, when CCP/SAFE was young and frisky, occupancy rules were used as a way to get gang houses emptied. I lived in the 3000 block of Portland then and the house next door to me, where the local Rolling 30s Bloods was formed and hung out, had 37 people, including 5 children, living in a triplex (2-2 bedrm units, 1-1 bedrm unit).
(Ah, the "good old days." May they stop haunting our dreams in the near future.)
Students are apparently viewed in somewhat the same light as gang bangers. The similarities might be overcrowding, loud parties, poor policing of trash and garbage, drunk and disorderly....
The numbers are purely arbitrary and most likely reflect the needs of those who spoke to the council persons or aldermen of the time it was written/last amended.
I do think that occupancy rules are frequently honored in the breach, but do not come to the attention of Inspections so long as the occupants are quiet, tidy, and more or less regular in their habits, probably because the numbers are arbitrary. There is also the cultural habit, used for centuries, of having big families in small houses, so long as they are related. Parents, a grandparent (sister, brother, uncle) and ten kids in a six or seven room house was unremarkable.
The fault in the code is requiring blood and family ties in describing the arbitrary numbers embedded in the code. (I believe it says something like 'no more than 4 unrelated persons in a unit'.) The city has no legitimate interest, other than custom and a more than small tendency toward puritan tribalism, for describing the parameters of a legitimate household. The city could argue a legitimate reason for asking how many are children in a household of x persons in terms of fire code compliance.
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