[news] the war on you

[dot_fennel]

Well, on many of you.

Mo. Town Denies Unmarried Couple Permit

When I first read about this, I assumed they had gotten turned down for domestic partnership registration, or maybe some kind of public aid. But no: The city council of a Missouri town declined to change-- and the mayor suggested he might soon enforce-- a rule forbidding four or more people from living together unless connected by "blood, marriage or adoption". If you try, you can be evicted by the city.

(This came up when an unmarried couple with three children was refused an occupancy permit, which seems like an insane interpretation of the law in the first place; the kids are blood relatives of both parents, after all. Saying that any pair of people has to be connected directly to each other by blood/marriage/adoption would essentially forbid two people that each had a child in a previous marriage from getting married, even if both parents adopted the other's kid-- the children still wouldn't be blood relatives.)

I have to ask: Are there unenforced laws like this all over the place which I just haven't heard about? (Are there enforced laws like this, in which case I would feel very naive?)

Comments

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

Many "nice" towns in our area have statutes like that... supposedly to keep out "undesirables" like flop houses, cults and communes. If we are lucky they go unenforced unless you present a nuisance.

Pretty unproductive from a land-use perspective. Yep, our town Really Wants every nuclear family to occupy a full acre of land. Ick! FWIW they're starting to rethink this and consider allowing mother-in-law appts, cause hey! they just realized a nuclear family on a one-acre plot uses more town services than it pays for in taxes! OOPS! EIT.

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

I think catya, shayde, and crew had this come up when they bought the original Homeport, although I believe what they ran into had to do with unrelated adults, at least. At least one MA town has such a law.

There's one in Bloomington, IN, too.

[ert.livejournal.com]

Do you mean blue laws in general, or weird cohabitation laws in particular? The former are everywhere.

[dot_fennel]

Oh, yeah, I know blue laws are still ridiculously widespread on paper (not that I'm content with their extent in practice, either). I meant specifically *group* cohabitation laws.

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure such laws are unconstitutional. Don't quote me on it, though.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yes.

My husband lived in an MIT fraternity in Brookline, and they had to do odd things legally to skirt precisely such a law -- some kind of license renewed yearly. Actually, I think Brookline's law specifically prohibited more than n unrelated women from living together -- it's an old law to combat brothels. (His fraternity was coed.)

I've heard of a similar law in, I think, Virginia being used to discriminate against extended immigrant families (this one required more stringent kinds of blood relation, like parent/child or brother/sister) -- trying to prohibit large multigenerational immigrant networks from living in single-family houses, as they so often do while getting started in life here, and as native-born Americans so often don't.

I think these laws tend to be town-level, not state-level, so you don't hear about them as much. And they are often not enforced any more because they no longer reflect social realities. But they certainly exist should they need to be used to smack around people who are Not Like Us, whoever Us happens to be in town hall.

[cabell.livejournal.com]

The n unrelated women law is on the books in Kirksville, MO, too, where I went to undergrad. There are no sorority houses.