For better or worse, there will always be some houses in Denver whose inhabitants — co-workers or students, perhaps — share living space in theoretical violation of the zoning code. The limit long has been two unrelated adults per household. Yet, in reality, there’s probably little to stop two or three roommates from slipping their share of the rent under the door each month to another one or two roommates who are actually on the lease.

However, that squares with the law — not to mention the sensibilities of their neighbors — it raises even more questions about the true aims of a controversial proposal before the Denver City Council to significantly increase the number of unrelated adults who can share a residence. It also raises all the more doubt about the proponents’ claims that the measure, a sweeping rewrite of the zoning code, is intended to make housing more affordable.

Whatever demand there is in the Denver rental market for the kind of housing arrangement described above, it likely is being met already with a wink and a nudge. Any impact that the pending change to the zoning code would have on affordability is negligible.

The proposal would allow up to 10 unrelated people — and any number of their relatives — to live in single-family homes 2,600 square feet or larger. Smaller homes could accommodate up to five unrelated people. And our guess is that even the proposal’s true believers don’t really see it as some sort of silver bullet for metro Denver’s spiraling housing costs.

It doesn’t even sound plausible coming from chief proponent and City Council member at large Robin Kniech, in a newsletter she has been sending to the measure’s critics:

“Some of our neighbors who struggled with high housing prices even before the pandemic, or with job losses during it, are facing risk of displacement under the current code, because they didn’t realize they couldn’t share a 3 or 4 bedroom house with 3 or 4 roommates, a situation that would be legal in almost every one of Denver’s peer Colorado cities or nationally.”

It’s a safe bet the many unfortunate Denverites whose lives and livelihoods have been turned inside out amid COVID are doing what they have to do to get by. If that means moving in with others, they’re doing it. Whether or not it makes sense to tweak the zoning code in some limited way to make those arrangements legitimate in times of need is another matter. But it’s a stretch to the extreme to suggest doing so will have any appreciable impact on rent in a city where housing costs have been soaring for years for far more fundamental economic reasons.

Hence, the mounting misgivings about the new zoning initiative — and the growing sense that the main rationale to ratcheting up the limit on unrelated residents is something very different: Essentially, to allow satellite homeless shelters and community corrections facilities to proliferate citywide. The plan’s fans have soft-pedaled that aspect, yet it has the potential to undermine and upend neighborhood after neighborhood.

It’s a big reason for our own opposition to the ill-conceived notion, and Kniech does little to ease that concern in her newsletter:

“Most residents experiencing homelessness have been in the Denver area for a long time. Many of those released from incarceration, or sentenced to community corrections as an alternative, came from Denver neighborhoods…. This proposal is about meeting the needs of Denver neighbors in the city where they already live and have ties.”

Her loose use of the word “neighbors” for the diverse range of people who roam Denver’s streets, panhandle its intersections and pitch tents in its parks, as well as for those just returning from a stay in Cañon City, pretty much writes off the concerns of all the other “neighbors” in the equation. As if to say, “There’s a new kid on the block. Get used to it!”

The proposal, which has been in the planning and drafting stages for some time at Denver City Hall, only this past summer began to gain the full attention of a lot of the Denver residents it would affect. They had spent much of last spring sheltering in place as directed by authorities — while Denver’s Community Planning and Development department pushed ahead full speed with the proposal. As more residents and neighborhood groups have found out about the plans, more and more of them are expressing serious concerns and outright opposition.

Fortunately, some of Kniech’s council colleagues have been hitting the brakes on the proposal in recent weeks, as we’ve noted here recently. Our hope is the council will halt this process altogether and send it back to the drawing board. If more focused, demand-driven changes are needed in the zoning code, let the city’s planners come back with a proposal that has bona fide buy-in from the whole community.