Would the housing crisis relieve it if boomers would rent out their empty rooms?

Monte Anderson opened a broom cupboard in his kitchen and pointed to a door handle at a mop and a garbage can. Somewhere on the other hand there was a small solution for the affordable home crisis of America.

Mr. Anderson is a developer who is rehabilitating commercial and residential buildings in and around Dallas, including the house in Ranch style where he lives with three kinds of housemates for the time being. The 2,400 square foot house is split into four studio apartments. Each has an external entrance, but also connects through a door through a door like it in his kitchen cupboard.

The doors of the connection are locked and hidden because they are designed not to be used. The main reason for their existence is that they allow Mr Anderson to claim that he lives in a single -family home, In accordance with local destination codesWhen the house actually contains four apartments in a country that needs more of it.

“This is a retrofit in the suburbs,” said Mr. Anderson, 66, during the Tour.

Economists estimate that America needs between four million and eight million more houses. Their recipe is to build many new houses and apartment complexes. It is a remedy that politicians from both parties in principle agree, but that will certainly take decades to reach.

It costs money to buy land, time to secure permits. In the meantime, the construction costs have exploded. That is why most new houses are usually luxury rental properties or higher houses, instead of something that a person with a middle or lower income can pay. However, those cheaper units are those in the shortest stock.

This imbalance has become policymakers and entrepreneurs such as Mr Anderson to a large and undervalued market: the houses of 145 million that already exist.

About two -thirds of the American housing stock consists of single -family homes. Apartment buildings are essentially forbidden from large parts of large metropolitan areas, where most of the country is zoned for neighborhoods with low density. Mr. Anderson tries to find a Maas in the law by leading single -family homes to a new life with several families.

There was a time when large houses were what the United States needed. When Mr. Anderson’s house was built in the 1970s, American mothers had on average more than three children, according to the Pew Research Center.

Today that has shifted: people get married at an older age or not at all, have fewer children (on average two for mothers in 2020, according to PEW) and increasingly live with other adults in their families. The result is a home mistress in which Older people live in large houses with empty bedrooms While single adults and families with few children are looking for smaller, more affordable places.

‘The roommate house“The name of Mr. Anderson for his chopped Ranch-house-is designed for this new world. A serial rehabilitation has adopted Mr Anderson Stripwalls, a cinema and a former wax paper factory that now contains around 70 small companies, including a microbbrouwerij, a boxing gym and a mixture of Artisans and home products.

All his projects are spread over Dallas and his suburbs, a region where he has spent his entire life. But within that area Mr. Anderson in motion and often takes his home what he has just built. For a while he lived in a boutique hotel and then moved to an apartment complex that he had redeveloped. Now he is in the chopped house.

“Sometimes I have to do it for financial reasons, but usually I do it to see what I did well and what I did wrong,” said Mr Anderson. “To do the experiment, I have to live in it.”

The units in the roommate rental for $ 1,800, including utilities. For that price it is not affordable for tenants with a low income. But he offers a refuge for a 27-year-old woman who works in a supported facility, a 70-year-old accountant and the 20-year-old granddaughter of Mr Anderson, who is a broker. And in its way of thinking, the building itself stands for something: a proof or concept for a way of life.

Change without disturbance

In the past decade, cities and states throughout the country have tried to encourage ideas such as those of Mr Anderson by making it easier to add rental units to existing structures. Some have adopted laws that allow it backyard houses and garage and basement units. Others encourage homeowners to subdue their plots and sell a part for development.

The aim is to add housing in existing neighborhoods without creating too much disruption – or to generate residents that Don’t like change. In many cases the efforts have made More important results Then attempts to add entire cities to Rezone or apartment buildings to streets of single -family homes.

Consider California, the home of the largest affordability crisis in the country. Since 2016, state laws have proposed a snowstorm of homes, of forcing outdoor areas to allow housing with several families To strip cities from authority for land use If they do not approve homes faster. But if you look at the number of units that has been built since the legislative power began to concentrate on housing, it is the modest backyard cottage – an “accessory home” in the jargon of city planners – the most important light place.

In 2016, before California adopted different laws, making AdUs easier to build, local authorities allowed around 1,000, which is in a state of 40 million people in principle zero. In 2023, the state allowed around 23,000, while the number of new single -family homes and apartment buildings in essence remained as farmer.

The ADU laws created an entrepreneurial treelet -a literal cottage industry that helps homeowners get permits, to build units and use software to identify suitable lots. Phil Levin, an executive of Technology from Bay Area that has a Evangelist for common liferecently started Living near FriendsA company that helps people to suddenly identify whose size and regulations are ideal for several families to live on.

Ben Bear is the Chief Executive of Buildcasa, a Oakland company founded in 2022 to take advantage of new laws in California with which homeowners can subdivide their property and sell their back garden for development. The company is a hybrid real estate play that develops a number of properties, but usually acts as a broker who connects other developers with homeowners who want to add units.

Mr Bear estimates that the state could add millions of units in this way and at the same time unlock billions of value for homeowners. So far, he said, many of his customers are parents who have split their plots to build houses for their adult children or old homeowners are looking for income.

“They are boomers who bought a long time ago and paid off their houses and possess the biggest lots,” he said.

Mr. Anderson, in Dallas, sometimes rents his rooms via Padsplit, a company located in Atlanta that is essentially a roommate version of Airbnb: the software platform connects tenants who are looking for rooms with homeowners looking for tenants.

How households are reformed

Housing arrangements are always shifted with culture and the economy. During the Second World War, a different shortage of housing buildings made Americans to cut up houses and create hotels in large cities. The shortage was relaxed during the post -war boom, while developers built the modern suburbs en masse, often with modest houses with two and three bedrooms.

At the same time, the composition of households shifted from multigenerational groups to a mix of nuclear and one age of one households. That trend has begun to turn.

In a new book, ‘Doubled Up’, Hope Harvey, a professor of public policy at the University of Kentucky, documents how high rental prices, the precarious labor market and the need to take care of older parents or young children has made multi -ownerational households much more often.

This shift is most common in households with a lower income and reflects the yawning inequality and a fraying safety net, along with the housing shortage. But the trend has steadily increased the income ladder because the rent and house prices have escalated.

“The housing market is so expensive, the childcare market is so expensive that these families have the feeling that they to double their goals,” said Dr. Harvey in an interview.

These are usually economic decisions: Dr. Harvey said that most people she had spoken with for her book to live in someone else’s house as a temporary arrangement. Most people do not want to handle rasperancing, such as sharing a living room, or cleaning up dishes immediately because they live with a neat freak. Some do not like to never be alone.

Mr. Anderson said his roommate house was designed with this aversion of solidarity in mind. He bought the house for $ 300,000 when the borderline was uninhabitable – a destroyed kitchen, empty swimming pool, leaking roof – and spent around $ 1 million renovating. He also added a back garden house that looks out on a re -upright swimming pool. A wooden deck, gravel walkways and cactus landscape give the site a desert atmosphere from the middle of the century.

“It’s not exactly where I want to live myself,” he said. “Although I like it.”

Including the apartment where Mr. Anderson is currently living in, the rents would yield a little more than $ 9,000 a month, which is just enough to cover the mortgage and costs.

Why build something with so little financial benefit? The hope of Mr Anderson, he said, is that the project will inspire others and show cities that several families can exist together in single -family neighborhoods. This, he argued, would yield more tax revenues, increase real estate values ​​and possibly inspire others to hire his company to develop more houses such as his.

Moreover, although the meager return may not tempt Wall Street, he said: “It is a financial winner if you have an older parent who can live here instead of assisting living.”

While we walked through a new empty unit who lived there, moved to North Carolina-Zei Mr. Anderson that his goal is to create a happy medium with cheaper units and a sense of community. But that community only works because people can keep the doors closed and ignore each other.