Note: The Lawrence Times runs opinion columns and letters to the Times written by community members with varying perspectives on local issues. These pieces do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Times staff.
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Lawrence City Commission will be looking at our occupancy limits this week, specifically whether it should be three or five unrelated people living together. I’d like to share my thoughts.
When I Google “Do occupancy limits lower housing costs?”, the AI overview tells me that occupancy limits can actually raise costs. In fact, there are numerous websites about lower housing costs that lists doing away with occupancy limits as one of the ways.
Occupancy limits can reduce the supply of available housing. An occupancy limit makes five people willing to live in a five-bedroom house split up and live in two different units instead. Or maybe three of them live in the house anyways and just have two empty bedrooms while the other two renters find someplace else. Either way, it requires two housing units instead of one. I believe allowing five people to live together in a five-bedroom house will free up more units available for rental, which will slow down the rising rent prices as it increases supply for the demand.
My question to our city commissioners is if they think occupancy limits lower or raise housing costs? Right now there are some that live near campus that want the neighborhoods next to campus to have a three-person occupancy limit to keep the neighborhoods from being overrun with students. My response to that is why should the rest of us have to live with increased housing costs because adults who chose not only to live in a college town, but next to the campus itself, don’t want an increase of students living in the neighborhood? The majority of the town are renters, so policies that increase rent are polices that financially hurt the majority of the population.
My other problem with occupancy limits is that they define a family. The Golden Girls even did an episode about the unfairness of occupancy limits keeping nontraditional families from living together. Our three-person occupancy limit would not allow the Golden Girls to live together. It would not allow for Uncle Joey to live with the Tanners after Becky married Jesse and moved in.
To be fair to nontraditional families, an occupancy limit would not define if the adults were related or not. I wonder how many families of four would still support our occupancy limit if relationship status didn’t matter, and no more than three adults could live together. Then when their children were grown, if both still wanted to live with them, they’d have to choose which one could. That’s the decision the city currently places on nontraditional families.
So in conclusion, our current occupancy limit drives up housing/rent costs by increasing the number of units required to house everyone and are unfair to nontraditional families. I’d also bring up the unintended consequences to the environment, but I’ve run out of space in this 500-word letter.
— Chris Flowers, Lawrence
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