We agree. Sharing an apartment with roommates is very common in major cities and university areas and that is where roommate problems are most prevalent.

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?

I think its a particularly American affliction: to know ones roommates in advance. Perhaps its an artifact from the formative years, where the shock of living with a stranger is learned for the first time, and subsequent entrance into society is predicated with a desire to not have "a roommate experience which sucked".

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.

I'm In Boston and most folks I know who live with roommates found them through posts online. People who knew their roommates before living with them are definitely the exception, not the norm.