How to read the statuses. A green badge is not a permit. It means the code we read does not cap unrelated occupants at a level that breaks the model, or the cap is high enough to be workable. Amber means it works with a licence, a permit or a specific lease structure. Red means a material provision conflicts with renting by the room in ordinary residential zones. Verify with the jurisdiction before you buy.

Read this as a count, not as a verdict. We will not tell you a city “rarely enforces” its code, because a citation count cannot support that sentence and someone would buy a house on it. Four things it genuinely cannot see: a complaint that closes before a case is opened; a city that enforces through zoning or the fire marshal instead of code enforcement; a register that does not go back far enough; and wording we did not search for. A quiet signal is a reason to ask the jurisdiction a specific question — not an answer. A blank is not a zero. Cities whose register has no searchable description field are left out entirely rather than published at nil. And this does not rank cities against each other. Every register defines its own fields, logs a different mix of complaint types and covers a different span of years, so two cities sharing a word may be nothing but a difference in record-keeping. Read it as one city’s own history; it is not a league table. “Not enough data” is its own answer — it means the register was too thin for a nil match to mean anything, and we would rather say so than colour the city quiet.

The counts behind these words are part of a membership. We counted every case in each register whose own text mentions rooming, boarding, unrelated occupants, roomers or overcrowding. The signal above is free and always will be; the case counts, the matched wording, the periods covered and the named source register for each city are what members pay for. See what a membership includes.

Complaints per case is the number to read, and only where we could compute it honestly. Lots of residents reporting room-rental problems and few cases opened is the closest thing to a real answer on the question everyone actually asks. We compute it only when both feeds exist for the same city and their periods overlap by at least five years — a 311 feed starting in 2020 divided by a case register starting in 1994 is not a ratio, it is an artefact. Where the overlap is too short, members get the two raw counts and no ratio rather than a made-up one.

The counts behind these words are part of a membership. The same count against each city’s 311 request feed, plus the complaints-per-case ratio wherever the two feeds overlap far enough to compute it. The signal above is free and always will be; the case counts, the matched wording, the periods covered and the named source register for each city are what members pay for. See what a membership includes.