America's 'Empty Bedrooms' Back on the Market: Can Room-Sharing Solve the Housing Crisis?

One seemingly obvious solution to America's affordable housing crisis has been hiding in plain sight all along — renting out spare rooms. This once-common practice is re-entering the policy conversation, and advocates believe it could go a long way toward keeping people off the streets.

Single-Room Occupancy Was Once the Urban Norm

At the turn of the 20th century, as waves of immigrants flooded American cities, day laborers and factory workers desperately needed cheap, flexible places to stay. A small room could be rented by the day, by the week, or for however long a tenant needed. These arrangements took many forms but gradually came to be known collectively as Single Room Occupancy, or SRO.

SROs served the residential needs of urban working-class people — a flexible, low-cost housing model. It didn't aim for comfort or space; it met the most basic need for shelter at the lowest possible barrier to entry. That's precisely the kind of option many struggling people lack today.

Postwar Stigmatization and the Mass Disappearance of SROs

The turning point came after World War II. As middle-class white families relocated to spacious new suburban homes, SROs became associated with poverty and social deviance. Cities like New York began banning new SRO construction in the 1950s; by the 1970s, SROs had become a familiar villain in media coverage — even as they still provided shelter for hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Over the following two decades, approximately one million of these affordable units vanished from the market. Cities employed various tactics to restrict SROs, including one particularly common measure: outright legislation prohibiting unrelated adults from sharing a roof. These restrictions were framed at the time as urban improvement initiatives, but the cost was the elimination of vast amounts of low-cost housing.

The policy logic of this era was closely tied to the Urban Renewal movement. Under the framework of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, the federal government allocated massive funding authorizing local governments to acquire and clear "blighted" neighborhoods — and SRO districts were often among the first targets. Meanwhile, Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage guarantee policies carried overt racial and class biases, offering favorable terms only for single-family suburban homes, making urban room-rental housing look even more "backward" by comparison. Scholars have since characterized this period as one in which public policy systematically destroyed the housing market serving low-income transient populations without providing equivalent alternatives — sowing the institutional seeds for the large-scale homelessness crisis that would follow.

The Policy Pendulum Begins to Swing Back

The idea that banning low-cost housing was a mistake has been brewing in urban planning and policy circles for roughly 15 years, growing louder as the homelessness crisis has worsened. Now, re-legalizing the rental of spare rooms — what policy experts call "home-sharing" — finally appears to be gaining real legislative momentum.

Colorado lawmakers passed a law prohibiting cities from restricting the number of unrelated roommates sharing a home without a clear health or safety justification. That law became a model for subsequent legislation, giving rise to proposals popularly dubbed the "Golden Girls Bill" — so named because the roommate arrangements depicted in the beloved 1980s sitcom, featuring four unrelated women living together, would technically be illegal under many states' current laws.

In policy terms, "home-sharing" specifically refers to homeowners or primary tenants renting spare rooms to unrelated third parties — distinct from short-term rental platforms like Airbnb that operate as commercial hospitality businesses. Advocates stress that legalizing home-sharing requires no new construction investment whatsoever; it simply means removing the legal barriers that prevent existing housing stock from being fully utilized. Many American cities' restrictions on unrelated occupancy were originally enacted in the name of preserving neighborhood order, but their practical effect has been to criminalize flexible rental arrangements, exposing landlords and tenants to legal risk and suppressing this market's organic supply.

The 'Golden Girls Bill' and the 'Room Act' Spread Nationwide

Pennsylvania introduced its own version of the Golden Girls Bill this year, passing it through the state House of Representatives over the summer. At least six more states are reportedly expected to take up similar legislation by 2027, with momentum spreading across the country.

Beyond easing roommate restrictions, a separate legislative effort aims to re-legalize SROs more broadly through bills known as the "Room Act." One version of this legislation has already been introduced in Rhode Island. The two tracks — lifting roommate restrictions and rebuilding SRO supply — are advancing in parallel, forming a systematic correction to decades of housing policy.

Not Everyone Wants to Rent a Room, But It Should Be an Option

Not everyone wants to rent just a bedroom, but many people would welcome that arrangement at certain points in their lives. Maybe they're paying down debt, going through a breakup and need a quick place to land, or simply don't want to take on a full apartment.

Advocates argue that keeping "renting a room" available as an affordable option can help many people avoid sliding gradually into homelessness. The solution to the housing problem doesn't always have to mean building more new units — sometimes it means restoring the flexible, affordable ways of living that we once banned ourselves.