It may sound out of whack, but there’s still a rule in Salt Lake City that limits folks who are related by blood from having unrelated roommates in the same home.
The city ordinance that’s been on the books for nearly 50 years also allows no more than three unrelated residents to live under the same roof. Meanwhile, a growing number of people in the capital city struggle to find viable housing at all.
“In this day and age,” city planner Nick Norris said Tuesday, “[it’s] an absurd regulation.”
Civilian code enforcers say the existing home occupancy limits are, well, unenforceable — not least for having to demand that residents prove their family relations, or lack thereof.
What’s more, city officials say they don’t want to be in charge of defining what makes up a family.
In April, the Salt Lake City Council asked staff to target the long-standing occupancy rules for major change — and now the council seems poised to all but wipe the old requirements away.
“I don’t want our ordinance to define what is a family unit,” said council member Darin Mano, “because that’s so different for everybody.”
Mano, who is also an architect, did suggest the city might instead impose limits on the number of residents per bedroom, to address potential overcrowding. Others made the same point about shared bathrooms.
In an unofficial poll at Tuesday’s council meeting to guide upcoming changes, though, policymakers seemed to be tilted toward switching to a much stripped-down version of the occupancy rules dating to city books in 1928, allowing any number of people to live together.
Building codes, however, could still cap the total number of people under one roof.
Only that, according to Norris, would adequately address a host of enforcement problems while also reducing housing costs for both owner-occupants and renters and treating related and unrelated households equally.
The current three-person cap, Norris noted, “prevents people from spreading out their housing costs by sharing it with more roommates, if that’s what they can afford or what they choose to do.”
Many of Utah’s other large cities take a similar stance to Salt Lake City’s existing ordinance, with Ogden, Provo, Sandy, St. George, South Salt Lake, Bountiful and Logan all setting limits of two to four unrelated people per home.
Draper stands alone for allowing “any number of people living as a single housekeeping unit.”
Unlike other western U.S. cities, Denver, Portland, Seattle and Spokane limit outright the number of unrelated roommates per household at between five and eight people.
Salt Lake City’s own tacit definitions of family households shifted several times after the end of World War II, allowing in 1948 “any number of people living as a single household” and then, in 1955, no limit on “a collective body of people living together with some domestic bond.”
The city’s current definition has gone unchanged since 1978.
The latest U.S. Census data, meanwhile, put the city’s average household size at 2.19 residents as of 2023, down slightly from 2016. For Utah as a whole, that number was at 2.9 people in 2023.
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