Housing Code Defines What Makes a Family

BLACK JACK, Mo. — The last of the moving boxes has been put away, and the basketball hoop is installed next to the garage door. The refrigerator is covered with vacation snapshots and notices of an upcoming PTA meeting. Yet Olivia Shelltrack and Fondray Loving and their three kids are not yet settled into the sprawling five-bedroom home they bought in January.

In this middle-class suburb of St. Louis, about 14 miles north of downtown, city leaders have ruled that because the couple are not married, they and their children don't belong.

Last week, the Black Jack City Council rejected a measure to change the law prohibiting more than three people from living together in the same house if they are unrelated by blood, marriage or adoption. To help enforce the law, anyone moving into a house in Black Jack, as an owner or renter, is required to go to City Hall, show identification for every resident and obtain an occupancy permit.

Shelltrack and Loving, who have lived together for 13 years, said they did not know about the law when they bought their two-story yellow house early this year. The couple have two children together, and Alexia, Shelltrack's teen daughter, has called Loving her father since infancy.

"I don't get it," said the couple's middle child, 10-year-old Katarina Loving. "My mom and dad love each other. What's the big deal?"

The debate over how to define "family" has become increasingly heated after decades of changing social norms. And a growing number of urban and suburban communities are putting their foot down and turning to housing and zoning laws to say what is -- and isn't -- a family, said Frank S. Alexander, interim dean of Emory University's School of Law in Atlanta.

"It's a not-so-veiled attempt to control who lives down the street and [to] legislate relationships," said Alexander, who teaches a course on how housing laws define America's families. Though it happens across the country, he said, "no other state has so many of these laws in place as Missouri."

Occupancy laws have more typically been used to restrict establishment of boarding houses and fraternities in single-family neighborhoods, said Alexander.

In Black Jack, the law is designed to prevent overcrowding, Mayor Norman C. McCourt said in a statement. He also noted that no federal or Missouri law bars housing discrimination based on marital status. Some states do bar discrimination based on marital status, but Missouri is not one of them. The state also does not recognize common-law marriage. In the last presidential election, a fourth of state voters cited moral concerns as the key issue.