Co-Living Provides Community, Not Just Housing
Not even a year after tying the marital knot, Noah Tang, 28, found himself standing in a house alone, realizing that his wife was not coming back. The separation was final and the divorce would become final just a few months later. Beyond the whirlwind of emotions was the looming practical question: the mortgage. How would he pay it now that he was alone?
Then an idea hit him. As the owner of an old Victorian house that was just a mile from Illinois Wesleyan University and within biking distance to stores and cafés, Tang quickly realized that the spare rooms could function as comfortable flexible housing for grad students and interns. He put together an ad for Craigslist highlighting the offer and the perks — furnished rooms, walking distance to the library and a neighborhood bakery, month-to-month rental arrangements with no pets or smoking. He welcomed his first roommate a month after the divorce and, since then, has never had to worry about a mortgage payment again.
As in any college town, Bloomington landlords offer various housing options for students. However, they usually require year-long lease agreements that don’t fit the variety of situations in which students sometimes find themselves: four-month internships, short summer programs or semester-only study programs. Tang’s posts on Craigslist provided a rental option well below the market rate that would give students the flexibility and affordability they needed. It’s the perfect example of how allowing homeowners to rent out spare rooms can help abate the housing crisis.
In many cities, such arrangements would be considered illegal due to codes that ban unrelated adults from living together in a single-family home. In these places, the family part of that phrase is critical: The homes are for families, not for groups of college students or young professionals navigating transient life circumstances.
These kinds of bans have their roots in historic apprehension about large groups of unrelated immigrants housing together. In more recent times, they’ve been motivated by an aversion to short-term rentals, anxiety about the possibility of loud college parties, or concerns about changing neighborhood character, as was the case in the Kansas ban on co-living in 2022. “Residents are very up in arms about that,” Councilman Eric Jenkins told Business Insider when the ban passed. “It's really not in character with the neighborhood."
However, given today’s housing crisis, allowing adults to decide how best to allocate their spare rooms seems one of the easiest solutions cities can embrace. It requires no code changes, no new developments and no worries about complex legal compliance. The arrangement brings more housing options into the market without expanding the footprint of inefficiently large single-family homes. Tang pointed out the mismatch between the ever-growing size of these homes and the decreasing size of households — many homes feature three to four rooms but only one or two tenants. Allowing those spare rooms to be rented out provides a flexible form of transitional housing that’s appealing to students, interns and professionals trying to save money.
For young people like Tang, it not only provides a way to share the cost of housing but also a greater sense of community, which can boost individual resilience for life’s challenges.
Ultimately, Tang’s housing anxieties never actualized. The rental fees have covered his mortgage for four years now. Noah sees it as an overall positive experience. In fact, he says situations like this remind him of the value of having small-scale, relational landlords.
Echoing Jane Jacobs, he points out how filling this kind of role allows him to be more understanding and flexible. Referencing his friend who fell behind on rent due to unemployment, he said, “If that had happened with a corporate landlord, my friend would have gotten evicted.”
Strong Towns will release a toolkit to help local leaders make their cities housing ready in February 2025. Get a sneak peek here. Make sure to join our mailing list to be notified when this resource is available.
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.