Criminalizing the Golden Girls? Bans on Cohabiting

Big demographic changes in the United States over the past half-century have changed the face of the nation. More people are living single—and staying single. Fewer people are having children, or they are having fewer children than the generations before them. That means that today’s adults are increasingly likely to have no spouse, no kids, and few or no siblings.

As a single person who loves being single and is attuned to the many other single-at-heart people who also love being single, I worry about this less than some people do. People who are single at heart embrace their single lives and often form and maintain close relationships with friends and relatives beyond just immediate family members. Sometimes those people are considered members of the “families we choose.”

Members of queer communities have been forming families of choice for decades, especially when homophobia was more rampant, and they were sometimes rejected by their immediate family members. Now, it is commonplace for just about all adults to welcome into our lives people who do not fit conventional definitions of family. A survey of a nationally representative US sample of whites, African Americans, and Black Caribbeans found that 9 out of 10 said they had someone they treated like family even though they were not related to them.

Sometimes people want to live with their chosen family members. Part of the enduring appeal of The Golden Girls TV series is the potential for growing old with beloved friends and relatives, sharing stories and meals, the living room and the kitchen. Sharing a home can be an attractive prospect for those who worry about being lonely or just don’t want to live alone or cannot afford to. (Contrary to often-repeated claims, being single or living alone is not the same as being lonely or isolated.)

The problem is that in many places in the United States, people such as the Golden Girls would be considered criminals. They would be violating zoning laws by living together under the same roof.

In an article in the Atlantic, “Where living with friends is still technically illegal,” Michael Waters reported that in more than three-quarters of the largest metro areas in the United States, there are legal limits on who is allowed to rent or buy a single-family home. Those laws typically begin with a narrow, conventional definition of family as people related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Anyone who fits that definition can live together. Sometimes, but not always, a small number of unrelated persons can be included, too.

Restrictive Definitions of Family

Anyone who wants to live with a group of people who do not fit the prevailing legal definition of family are hurt by laws that are based on that definition. My interest is in people who are single and would like to share their lives, under the same roof, with cherished friends and relatives. In the Atlantic article, Waters described other examples as well, underscoring the point that zoning laws have long been exclusionary. The people getting excluded are typically members of devalued or disadvantaged groups, and sometimes that’s on purpose.

Examples of groups whose living arrangements were challenged or forbidden in particular towns include:

• Seasonal workers who wanted to share a home, in 2022
• People with disabilities living in a group home, in 2016
• Immigrant families living in multigenerational households, after 2005, when a law was passed restricting members of single-family households to immediate relatives
• Two men sharing a home ordered out of it in 1976, perhaps because they were assumed to be gay
• Foster parents, who have been challenged for having too many unrelated people—their foster children!—in their home, in 1961
• In what may have been the earliest attempt to define family narrowly in zoning laws, in 1916, the intent seemed to be to prevent Black people from moving into white neighborhoods

Signs of Progress

Social scientists sometimes talk about “doing family”; by that, they mean that family can be construed as the people who are doing the kinds of things that families typically do. Waters notes that, in the law, these are called “functional-family rules,” and they “allow groups who do traditional household acts, such as making meals together and sharing expenses, to count as family, regardless of biological or legal ties.” Those laws are increasing in popularity.

That’s a step in the right direction, but it is not enough. I agree with Waters, who ends his article by asking, “why restrict living arrangements to any kind of family at all?”

A version of this post was also published at Unmarried Equality.