KANSAS CITY, Mo. — One City Council member in Shawnee, Kansas, is asking her colleagues to reconsider an ordinance passed without opposition last month that prohibits homeowners from renting houses to four or more people who are unrelated to one another.
The ordinance, passed on April 25, limits co-living to three unrelated tenants in the Johnson County city. Council members have said the ordinance didn’t get any negative feedback when it was proposed, but it has since faced extensive scrutiny, with some calling it a ban on roommates that targets poor and working-class citizens.
Councilwoman Jill Chalfie, Ward 4, said during a City Council meeting late Monday that the ordinance — intended to solve a problem with companies turning single-family homes into apartments in single-family neighborhoods — had unintended consequences.
“I feel like our action was a little bit reactionary, and it stemmed from one instance that I think could have largely been solved through codes enforcement,” she said.
In December, a number of community members approached the City Council with concerns about a house in their neighborhood that had been sold and recently renovated. Neighbors noticed nearly a dozen cars parked in front of the single family home.
Upon further investigation, the city found that two such converted homes existed in Shawnee, both owned by a Prairie Village-based company HomeRoom, which advertises “seriously affordable rent.”
HomeRoom rents out several bedrooms across the metro area, ranging from $275 to $550 a month in rent, costs that are significantly lower than what is offered at most apartments in the area.
Council members saw the creation of a “mini apartment” — the results of converting a three- and four-bedroom home into seven bedrooms with individual locks and leases — as a way for property owners to by-pass rezoning laws.
“We want to protect and preserve neighborhoods for families that are potential buyers and those that are currently in those neighborhoods,” Councilwoman Jacklynn Walters, 4th Ward, told The Kansas City Star last week.
Chalfie, at the time, agreed. But on Monday she said she changed her mind, having initially interpreted the language of the ordinance incorrectly.
“I think in trying to stop this one thing, we prohibited a lot of other things, including people’s reasonable right to live in their home with who they choose to live with,” Chalfie said, later adding: “For me, I think I got this one wrong.”
Chalfie asked that the council revisit the ordinance at a future meeting to clarify or modify the language.
No other council members vocalized a similar opinion.
Councilman Eric Jenkins, Ward 2, in defending the ordinance Monday, at one point read from an email addressed to the council from Henry E. Lyons, president of the Johnson County NAACP, who said he was supportive of the ordinance and could not find any language that was racist, rebutting many claims that the ordinance was written with the wealthy, white nuclear family in mind.
“We hired additional attorneys to get this right, and we can’t worry about what is written in headlines in the media,” Jenkins said. “We did the right thing, and I’d stick by it.”
Jae Moyer, who currently pays $950 for a one-bedroom apartment in Overland Park, said that in 2020, they lived in a three-bedroom duplex with three roommates in Overland Park. Under the current ordinance, that would not be allowed in Shawnee.
The practice of co-living has become an increasingly popular option nationwide, especially for young professionals, as rental and housing prices continue to climb. In Johnson County, one housing study showed that the average home price in the county rose 37% from 2017 to 2021, climbing from $324,393 to $443,700. The same study also showed that wages did not rise at the same rate.
“I ask that you please put it back on the agenda,” Moyer said. “I understand what you were trying to do. I very much support what you were trying to do, but don’t put the burden on the renters.”
During Monday’s council meeting, which lasted nearly 5 1/2 hours, Lisa Larson-Bunnell, a former Shawnee council member, said that while she fully supports the regulation of the type of housing this ordinance was meant to address, she believes the ordinance does much more than that, and impacts families “in very real ways.”
Councilwoman Walters said Larson-Bunnell’s interpretation did not reflect how the city intended the ordinance, nor how they planned to enforce it.
”We’re not going to demand documents that show people are married, things of that nature,” Walters said, adding that the ordinance doesn’t apply to groups functioning as a “family unit.”
Christian Masters, who identified himself as a young professional and a homeowner in Shawnee, said that straight out of high school, he lived with three other adults, none of whom were related to him. He paid a modest rent to live in a bedroom of a house owned by one of his roommates’ parents. It was all he could reasonably afford.
“None of us can deny the housing market currently is in a chaotic state,” he said, adding that those who will be impacted most by the ordinance are those with lesser means, and young people just starting off their lives.
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