Did you ever watch the cartoons growing up, like _Hey, Arnold_ on Nickelodeon? Remember how Arnold's family ran a boarding house, with shared common spaces and bunch of people renting rooms (for years at a time!) and a diversity of humanity to provide Humanity, different perspectives, and other such forms of Color for the show?

Did you ever stop think about how weird that arrangement was? Do you know anyone who owns, operates, or lives in a boarding house?

And yet it's not really all that weird by historical standards. It's only in fairly recent times that cities decided to get all Moralistic about how Home, Family and Neighborhoods Should Be Structured and started imposing zoning restrictions with super emphasis on homes, waging war against boarding houses and residential hotels and flophouses and other haunts of the poor and lower classes in the name of Progress and Class Warfare. Can't quite afford a place that meets the minimum square footage requirements independently? Well, don't worry, we can find a place for you in the crime-ridden public housing projects or on the streets. Kiss your remaining independence goodbye and welcome to the Bureaucracy, because you're never going to be able to get on the bus to a new town with $100 in your pocket and find a place to crash for a few nights until you get a new job. Who would rent you a place like that anymore? There's the YMCA... and that's about it, _period_.

(Hell, a lot of the debates about AirBnB "abuse" end up rehashing these same problems.)