End 'unrelated' roommate bans

Many cities cap how many unrelated people can share a house—sometimes at just two—making the cheapest shared housing illegal despite a record number of empty bedrooms. Pew documents how post‑1950 rules that killed SROs and imposed occupancy limits helped fuel homelessness, while states like Iowa (2017), Oregon (2021), and Colorado (2024) have begun preempting local bans. The simplest, scalable reform is to let unrelated adults share homes on the same terms as families. — This reframes parts of the housing and homelessness crisis as a self‑inflicted legal scarcity that state preemption can rapidly fix without new spending.