April 28, 2005
3’s company
Fort Collins currently has a law (created in 1964) that prohibits more than three unrelated adults from living in the same household. Ostensibly, the idea behind the law was to prevent large numbers of college students from living in the same place and disturbing the neighbors with raucous parties, etc.
Currently, the City Council has endorsed a study session to tweak the law and make it more enforceable. The proposed tweaks are to change the law to a civil rather than a criminal offense, and raise the limit to four unrelated adults.
While this is a step in the right direction, the proper solution is to eliminate this useless law altogether. It’s not the pure number of people living in a house that makes them bad neighbors, it’s their personalities. This law does nothing to help the situation of a single musician living alone who regularly invites his band members over to practice til all hours of the night. Similarly, it punishes a group of 6 studious grad students who have formed a cooperative and live quietly next door. When I was an undergrad, I lived in a house with 7 other people, and our neighbors never seemed to mind. In fact, one little old granny seemed to appreciate the fact that we would shovel her walkway every time it snowed.
People will be assholes, and we already have laws regulating that, such as noise ordinances, unkempt lawn ordinances, no parking on the lawn, etc. As long as those ordinances are enforced, neighborhoods should retain their property values. The three (or four) unrelated law is both unnecessary and unfair.
April 29th, 2005 at 10:04 am
I disagree. The law provides leverage to keep neighbors inline. If you have neighbors who are a repeated nuisance, calling the police over and over again is not a good solution. This provides a “once and for all solution” to bad neighbors.
Additionally, this law is not enforced unless complaints are made. I have several college student neighbors that are in violation of this law, but are not causing problems. Nothing has been done to them.
April 29th, 2005 at 11:21 am
How does this law help if there are only two people living in your “bad neighbor” house? Or for that matter, if there are only three people living in that house?
In those cases, the law is useless and your only solution is exactly to call the police over and over again.
The point is, why does adding a fourth unrelated automatically assume “bad neighbor”? That is a bad assumption, and thus you should use the existing nuisance laws to correct the behaviors of your neighbors.
April 29th, 2005 at 11:30 am
Some random thoughts on this:
I cannot argue with your logic, but I still see the law as leverage against college student neighbors. “Get out of line and…”
I believe the law is designed against young people, who for economic reasons, will live more than 3 to a house. Two in a house wouldnt work in my neighborhood (not for college students anyway).
If I could replace it with an “bad renter ordinance”, that did not specify a number, I would do so.
I also find some problems (as do you) with existing nuisance laws. They are rarely and spottily (a word?) enforced. They are also difficult to get any action on (as you discovered with the dog ordinance).