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When I was in graduate school, I decided to rent out a couple of rooms in my house and put an ad in the local paper.
The responses I got could have been fictional, but were not: A firefighter who asked if it would be okay for him to wear a skirt and sit on my couch with no underwear on, a woman who asked if it would be okay if she took LSD in my backyard, weekly (she said she always prays before taking it, as if that would be a reassurance), and a host of other weirdos.
I selected the least strange applicants and they both turned out to be doozies, anyway. One woman would lie on her bed, flat on her back like a corpse, and leave the door of her room open - she didn't move for hours. Not sure why the door had to be open so you could see her. She also loved to cook the most foul smelling foods I have had ever encountered - the smell permeated everything and went through the vents to my area upstairs.
It was not a pleasant experience and I hope to never be in the position to have to live with anyone else ever again.
It only works if you screen people very carefully, OR if you only rent to friends, IOW--people you know well and get along with.
Agreed. Sure, on paper it sounds idyllic...having a few people team up to share the responsibility of housing costs and upkeep. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. Lots of weirdos out there, and just people being people.
A few years back my lease ended during Covid and I had to scramble to find a place, there was almost nothing available. I responded to an ad posted by a woman renting a room in her house, month to month, for cheap. She was physically disabled and needed help around the house here and there. I thought it would be a win-win for both of us. We met, spent an afternoon hanging out and talking, and it seemed like a good fit. (I'm female too, and pretty introverted and respectful of others' space and privacy)
Within two weeks I knew I had made a horrible mistake: she was nuts. Temper tantrums, coming up with absurd lists of "chores" I had to do, and daily interrogations. One day, out of nowhere, she told me I had to move out. Evidently I was "too quiet" and stayed in my room too much, and she suspected I was in there drinking or drugging. LOL! I was actually writing a book at the time, and I typically just prefer being alone reading or watching movies. Seems like she wanted a BFF to hang out and socialize with 24/7. I got the hell out of there.
I'm in my 40s and waaaay too old for disruptive nonsense like that. Home should be a peaceful sanctuary away from the madness and noise of the world. After that experience I can say without a doubt that I will NEVER be roommates with anyone ever again. I'd rather be homeless than have to share living quarters.
There was recently a thread started by someone asking if it was a good idea to rent a room out in their house. The responses of "NO" clocked in at around 100%. https://www.city-data.com/forum/rent...ied-house.html
In my area, you can rent a HOUSE for about $700 per month. The most I might get for renting out a room would be maybe $350 per month. For $4200 per year, it's not worth the risk of having my identity stolen, my stuff stolen, my dog abused, having drugs sold out of my house, or putting up with any other problems from a roommate who can only afford $350/month in rent.
Similar in my area.
And, generally speaking, a mortgage is cheaper than many apartments.
Serious question. Much of the population is on the verge of serious financial trouble, half the population is one paycheck away from complete ruin, and yet single, childless adults are continuing to insist on living alone. Why?
I've had housemates for 16 years straight, I've had a total of well over 25 housemates, 100% of them complete strangers that I had never met before and very few issues. I have a hard time believing that people are really running into that many issues. What gives?
In my area, you can rent a room or suite big enough to have a private refridgerator, bathroom AND bedroom, and still be paying $10k/year less than the cheapest studio apartment in the same area. You can even have separate leases so you are not financially liable if your housemates do not pay rent. You don't even have to talk to your housemates more than once a year if you don't want to. People are literally paying $10k/year to not have to share a mailbox, laundry room and dishwasher? It isn't as though the cheap studio gives you acoustic isolation either.
I sincerely don't understand what the origin of this cultural coliving-phobia is.
Did you not have a thread about room mates because of the amount of a potential mortgage?
Live in a room with fridge/bathroom in a place with strangers to save 10k? Yes, not having to listen to a stranger snort and fart in the kitchen at 5:50 and knowing what has been in the wash machine or the dishwasher is worth 10k. Free porn - listen to your room mate?
Where do you live that private fridge and own bathroom, etc are affordable? I've never ever seen a living situation with two refrigerators unless you are talking about something like a garage apt or an in-law suite. Definitely not in a condo or apartment.
And make no mistake, an awful lot of the discord between roomies is over what goes on in the shared kitchen. Food theft, dirty dishes, not replacing used up supplies, sharing space for food, and use of each others pots and pans and dishes.
Another part of the equation is that the sense of entitlement has grown to such proportions that many people are no longer willing to make any concessions, as mentioned above. They do whatever they want to do with no concern about the roommate. Lot's of visitors, late nights, loud and noisy.
My daughter once brought in a roommate who took it upon herself to add a second cat to the household, a cat that added to the monthly rental fee, a cat she left to my daughter's care frequently, a cat that constantly fought with my daughter's cat, and a cat she ultimately 'forgot' to take when she moved out. My daughter has sworn never again to put up with that sort of hassle.
My alma mater is a UC (University of California campus). The only sister of one of my best friends (also a fraternity brother) was a student at a different UC (Santa Barbara) at the same time, and we'd visit her.
One year she lived in a three bedroom apartment with five other people on the beach side of Del Playa Drive in Isla Vista.
The six of them were so distrustful of each other re food (at least re food that needed to be refrigerated) that they had six of those little smallest cube plug in refrigerators, all of them plugged in, and each had a chain wrapped around it like if you were wrapping a present, and tight, with a padlock securing each so that no one could open any of the fridges unless it was their own fridge where they could get the padlock off. I've never seen that anywhere else. It did have the benefit of keeping each roomie's food intact during big parties.
I've had roommates in college and a couple of times during my career. Most weren't personally chosen by me, they were "assigned" roommates in shared dorm or field camp bunkhouse situations for relatively short periods of time. That made many things bearable...because you could see the end approaching on the near horizon. One assigned housemate was a complete disaster. Guess who ended up being asked to leave? Not me! I try very hard to be quiet, respectful, tidy, and financially responsible. No one has ever complained about needing to share a place with me.
I've only shared a house with another person a couple of times. We got along OK but I still felt pressured to conform socially all the time. I prefer not to share living space with someone who isn't a romantic partner. I happen to dislike the socializing, partying, noise, music and commotion many others in the country think nothing of. I'm pretty private and modest to a rather silly degree . That's OK. Whenever I could afford it, I rented a place for myself; down to cabins with no utilities or comforts. Just made do. I've found ways to afford it pretty much all of my adult life. Nowhere near being unable to afford a modest solitary home of my own.
I lived in a college dorm with a roommate for a year. That was enough of that.
Indeed, I had the barracks experience, but I had been in enough college dorms in my youth (friends, brother's, girls I was seeing back then, etc.) to know what they're like, and while that's fine for someone in their teens and early 20's it's really not appropriate for someone in their late 20's and beyond.
Having one's own space is a marker of adulthood. I can do what I want in my home, don't need permission to come and go, and am not concerned about violating someone else's privacy, noise levels, what lights can be on or off, etc.
One thing I've noticed though: The farther left someone trends on the political spectrum, the more likely they are to want communal (young, immature adult) living arrangements....or in some cases they want to force that arrangement onto others while enjoying their own elitist living arrangements.
As for me, I want privacy. Privacy is the hallmark of civilization. Communalism trends toward the barbaric. I respect the privacy of my neighbors and expect the same respect in turn. That, my friend, is how a fully functioning society should be run.
When I was in the Army (age 19-22) I shared a barracks room with 3 others of similar age. We had our own lockers, which I never worried about anyone opening. We could padlock them if there was any doubt about security. The one good thing about living in an Army barracks is that everyone is required to keep their area clean and squared away, as there was a room and bed inspection almost every day.
4 years of communal living was enough for me. After I returned to civilian life I've always had my own place. I have shared space with romantic partners from time to time but that is not the same as a "room mates" situation.
I lived with roommates from 18 to 30, and only moved out at the nexus of things feeling *really* bad at home due to roommates and making enough that I could still save 30% *and* pay for everything else on my own. I had a handful of good roommates, including one who I shared a 3 bedroom apartment with for 6 of those years with a rotating cast of characters for the 3rd. Due to folks moving out at weird times and a flexible landlord, there were stretches of time where we were rotating out our 3rd roommate every few months. It was... exhausting, stressful, and expensive.
A few examples...
- Roommate had gastric bypass surgery and expected me to take care of her. We were freshmen in college. When I refused to go get all of her meals or pick up things from her professors for her, she started locking me out of the suite when I was in the shower. Her mom was a high paid doctor and visited monthly from 10 hours away and set up an air mattress on our floor against my requests. Mom woke up at 6am and would get angry when I came in from class or one of my clubs at 9 or 10 at night since she was already in bed. RAs intervened, and roommate left me nasty notes through the rest of the year.
- First apartment out of college, living with two brothers. They both smoked a ton of weed, threw parties, and would take sleeping pills and fall asleep when their guests were still over. Our front door would only lock with a key from the outside and was so old/unresponsive landlords that it didn't stay shut when it wasn't locked. That meant routinely our front door was left wide open because guests had no way , and my cat got out on multiple occasions and I moved out after only a few months.
- When going through chemo at 23, I moved in with a friend who offered to be supportive after the brothers. I didn't ask for any real help, just someone who would be respectful of what was going on and take on more of a share of taking the trash out from our 3rd story walkup. He proceeded to throw major parties without fail on the nights I had chemo and I'd wake up the next morning to the whole apartment trashed. I would find out because our mutual friends would reach out to me while I was hooked up to pumps asking what they should bring. He also would invite his family to stay over from out of state. Not just one sibling, but all 3 of his siblings and both parents in our tiny 2 bed/1 bath apartment. When multiple conversations about talking about overnight guests in shared space (they slept in the living room) or parties went nowhere, I told his mom the next time she visited that her son was surprising me with their presence. She was sympathetic. He gave me one month's notice to leave.
- Three of us found a place together, having never met before. Two of us were really open about being introverts who would spend most of the time in our rooms, but for the first few months of living together we ate dinner together weekly and did occasional activities. Apparently, this wasn't enough and when the third told us she was moving out a few months later, she told us that us staying in our rooms was "ruining her life."
- A middle aged woman moved in with two mid-20s early professionals because she worked locally. She treated the place like an affordable crash pad where she would stay cheaper than an AirBnb or hotel during the week before going home 2-3 hours away for the weekend and 1 WFH day. It quickly became clear that she had a drug problem and was likely cheating on her husband, but paid her bills and for the most part didn't drag us into it -we just could smell weed on her and she was out most nights until 1 or 2 am. For the most part, it didn't impact her as a roommate. That is, until clearly her spending habits caught up with her and she had to suddenly move out. When her husband showed up to move her out, he screamed at us about "cheating her out of her money." She excused the missing money that was going toward whatever her nighttime activities were by saying that we were cheating her. It's not clear if she lied about how much rent was or wasn't truthful about what her share of utilities were. In either case, as "payback" they didn't pay last month's rent or utilities. Pocket change to them - she made more than the two of us made combined in professional but early level careers - but I had to drain my savings to pay it.
- Roommate moved her girlfriend in without saying anything. When the other roommate and I confronted her, she locked them in her bedroom and said that we couldn't kick the "girlfriend" out because they got married. Landlord evicted them.
- Landlord supposedly ran a background check (later found out that wasn't the case), but our Google and social media check-in lined up with everything he said. 6 months later, landlord reached out to me about checks bouncing and returned one of the checks. The name on it was an 85 year old Yiddish teacher in the midwest when the roommate claimed to be from the UK. I reached out to the synagogue where she taught to see if her identity was stolen since roommate was out of town. On his way home, he texted the two of us to ask for a house meeting. When he walked in the door, he spoke in an American accent saying he had multiple personality disorder and that the check was from his grandmother. The name he gave us was the name he had used professionally since college, but wasn't even close to his legal name. He moved out in the middle of the night 2 days later, leaving all of his stuff behind.
- Roommate was an international grad student who had never been taught or expected to do even basic cleaning. Had to literally show him to remove Chlorox wipes we kept in the bathroom from the container and clean up his pee stains all around the toilet.
- Final straw roommate was told that overnight guests were fine, but only when he was home and only 2 nights a week max given that there were 3 of us with significant others and only 1 bathroom. He decided that meant 2 nights per week per partner, and so there were frequently 2 of his "play partners" in his room at the same time. Threw out mental health excuses when I tried to talk to him about it. And they were loud, disrespectful about bathroom time, and started to use our washer-dryer on an almost daily basis as well. This was the point where I moved out.
The first night in my own place after leaving roommates, I breathed such a sigh of relief. I didn't realize that in my entire adult life, I had never, not once, felt at *home*. I never felt totally comfy sharing with roommates and as an introvert, I felt like I was relegated to my room most of the time. I got sick of duking it out for shelf space in the fridge and freezer (in no apartment did we ever have more than one apartment-sized fridge with a freezer on top), worrying about roommates paying bills or moving out suddenly, jockying for position to cook in a shared kitchen or use shared laundry, or worry about my bladder bursting when I woke up to someone in the shower.
Even my best roommate, the one I lived with for years, once was too embarrassed to tell the other two of us that he ran out of money to pay for electricity (the bill in his name) and so we were caught off-guard when the power went out.
So, suffice to say, if I can at all help it I have no intention of ever living with a roommate again.
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. That's OK. Whenever I could afford it, I rented a place for myself; down to cabins with no utilities or comforts. Just made do. I've found ways to afford it pretty much all of my adult life. Nowhere near being unable to afford a modest solitary home of my own.
