When I hear that term, it's often in related to Great Britain busy bodies. Local council tells you you can't do something, news at 11:00.

I suspect you have a baseline of rules that you try to apply. But your actual core of what you think you should be able to get away with doesn't scratch the surface of the American attitude.

So out here it is really specific to a 50 square mile area. Maybe it's a major city. Maybe it's a strip of Beach countryside that goes for 20 mi and is only 2 mi wide. It could be millions of residents or it could be a few thousand.

In each case it is local residents who get together and vote. Sometimes we are a bunch of people in the sticks like me here who have one-on-one relationships with the people actually on the city council doing the voting. And sometimes it's 50,000 to one. And in the one-to-one situations like around here there ain't nobody coming in to tell you what to do.

But then in a tiny little resort town 20 mi from me they simply limit a single household to a single rental unit ownership. You can't get more than a single license to rent a room if you have more than one property or more than one living space in your house so you can split it up a bit and share it.

This was claimed to be because they didn't like the fact that there are homeless people on the streets, that there are people renting their places and not working with the government to accept some type of subsidized housing voucher for these people.

I am talking a tiny resort town. That is dead half the year. I am talking maybe 3 mi long and 1 mi wide at the widest. And also keep in mind we are not in the sunny South. We are Northern latitudes and the winter can be a bit harsh. We're not a place where people can just be hanging out outside all year round and thinking they will just survive.

For 3 months (the tourist season) someone can rent out a room that allows them to live in their house the entire year. Because we can overcharge the tourists. That also means we can have 9 months of quiet in our house without dealing with being a landlord to a crappy tenant. And if you don't think government subsidized tenants aren't high probability crappy tenants, then I just have nothing to say to you. These people need live in social workers, not landlords. It only takes one crappy tenant in the same house you are living to destroy your life. No one does that if they don't have to.

It can take years of trying to kick someone out if they know how to juggle the legal system. Years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I will never rent to a real tenant. If they can get their mail here then they can't live here.

According to this license setup, a person with a large house cannot rent out to rooms to two roommates. That would be illegal according to this type of licensing scheme.

And I'm pretty sure the local motel owners are pushing that type of legislation because they don't want the competition.

Before that bit of legislation showed up they attempted to just turn off all personal rentals until they "studied" the problem out. Which would screw everybody who depended on that bit of income. So then they made it the one-to-one correspondence of single rental per owner license.

You can be sure that license doesn't carry the same burden as a real hotel or motel.

If that limitation ever spreads to me, I won't care. I only have the bottom half of my house.