As part of the general discourse around cost of living, Julia and I were talking about families sharing housing. This turned into us each writing a post (mine, hers), but is it actually legal for a family to live with housemates? In the places I've checked it seems like yes.

While zoning is complicated and I'm not a lawyer, it looks to me like people commonly describe the situation as both more restrictive and more clear cut than it really is. For example, Tufts University claims:

The cities of Medford, Somerville and Boston (in addition to other cities in the area) have local occupancy ordinances on apartments/houses with non-related persons. Each city has its own ordinance: in Medford, the limit is 3; in Somerville, it is 4; in Boston, it is 4, etc.

As far as I can tell, all three of these are wrong:

• Medford: it's common for people to cite a limit of three, but as far as I can tell this is based on a misunderstanding of the definition of a lodger. Medford:

  • Doesn't define a family.
  • Does define household, but as "all the people who occupy a single housing unit, regardless of their relationship to one another."
  • Defines lodger as "A person who occupies space of living and sleeping purposes without separate cooking facilities, paying rent (whether in money or services) which may include an allowance for meals; and who is not a member of the housekeeping unit."

  Since a shared house typically does function as single housekeeping unit (things like sharing a kitchen, eating together, no locking bedrooms, a single shared lease, sharing common areas, and generally living together) this is allowed.

• Somerville: the restriction was repealed two years ago.

• Boston: defines family as "One person or two or more persons related by blood, marriage, adoption, or other analogous family union occupying a dwelling unit and living as a single non-profit housekeeping unit, provided that a group of five or more persons who are enrolled as fulltime, undergraduate students at a post-secondary educational institution shall not be deemed to constitute a family." Then they define a lodging house as "Any dwelling (other than a dormitory, fraternity, sorority house, hotel, motel, or apartment hotel) in which living space, with or without common kitchen facilities, is let to five or more persons, who do not have equal rights to the entire dwelling and who are not living as a single, non-profit housekeeping unit. Board may or may not be provided to such persons. For the purposes of this definition, a family is one person." I read this to say that a group of people (even students) who live as a single housekeeping unit don't make something a lodging house.

This isn't just my reading zoning codes: a similar question came up in Worcester in 2013: City of Worcester v. College Hill Properties. The MA Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the unrelated adults sharing a unit together did not make it a lodging house because they were a single housekeeping unit and rented the whole place.

In other places there may be different restrictions, but everywhere I've looked so far it looks to me like this kind of shared housing, where a group lives together like a family even if they're not actually related, is allowed.