In the United States, nearly every young urban single who is not in the top income quintile has lived with housemates. But is it really inevitable? Or is it a consequence of bad housing regulations?

In Northern Europe, it’s rare to have housemates. Instead of living in a 750-square-foot, 3-bedroom unit with two housemates, 20-somethings live alone in 250-square-foot units. It’s a lot more convenient to live that way than to share space with people I don’t know well: there’s more privacy, I can keep whatever hours I want, there’s no shower crunch.

In the US, it’s illegal. There are minimum apartment sizes (New York’s is 400 square feet), or restrictions on how many kitchens one building can have (as in Seattle). Even legal micro-apartments have a hard time getting permits – the NIMBYs want more family-size units. Those bigger units are snatched by singles living three to an apartment, making everyone worse off. A family, after all, still can’t outbid three singles — and the singles have to live with one another.

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