Not sure were you're getting that. People live with unknown (before) roomates etc all the time.
I know it for a fact all over Europe, especially for younger people and Europe, but from the media, interviews, biographies and such I know it happens in the US too, to share the rent, etc.
Heck, weren't even a couple episodes of Friends were they were trying to find a new roomate?
Landlords commonly perform reference checks but individual owners or students looking to fill a room in their current apartment typically don’t have the resources to. Don’t they deserve to know more about their potential roommates before they’re sharing a living room with them?
In Europe, the roommate experience just sucks - from the get-go - because nobody wants a roommate, really. Americans, unwilling to fess up to this fact, seem to have created machinations designed to facilitate this ease.
We rent rooms in a couple of 3-bedroom houses and, as far as I know, our renters aren't friend, though they're usually friendly, they don't really socialize. I think you'd be a great apartment-mate for most of them.
In Berlin, for example, rents have been notoriously low (something like €500 would get you an appartment: http://berlin.en.craigslist.de/search/apa ), but also in many other cities.
Also in some cities the "city center" or parts of it has low rent because of many immigrants or things like that, and more wealthy people live for other parts/suburbs.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Small_Si...
The next step down is a townhouse:
http://media.point2.com/p2a/htmltext/a2c4/c0e3/62d9/4e6d5930...
These are all but nonexistent outside of cities in the US, though.
In Madrid I'm paying less rent for a studio in the center than what I was paying for a room in a shared flat in London Zone 3.
Of course, this is just the rent, not utilities & etc.
EDIT: Yes, by "house" I mean "apartment".
When I was in university, I got some awful roomates in my dorm - and now that I can pick my roomates, I'd love to be able to check if these people have caused problems in the past.
In my experience, people choose to live with friends. If they can't do that, they ask their friends for recommendations. And if they can't do that, they try very hard to live alone, in a closet if necessary, until they can make some friends.
The ways somebody can be a good or bad apartment-mate go much further than anything that I imagine can be discovered by a third party making a few phone calls according to a script. Can Assuredly knock out the most egregiously unpleasant people? Probably.
But it couldn't tell you that while I paid my rent on time and made no loud noises, I would be essentially absent from the apartment I shared one year because I all-but-moved-in with my girlfriend. And I didn't renew the lease because I did move in with her the next year. Was I a bad apartment-mate? That depends on what you wanted from me. I'm certain that I wasn't what was wanted in that case.