I used my good income job to rent a three room bedroom apartment, and rent out 2 of the rooms. I pay < $100 a week on bills and housing, and I live in a city where the median house price is > $1m.
I was upfront about it with the landlord. She could lease to a double income family, who're going to bargain with the rent at every opportunity, and complain about every issue that comes up that could possibly be the landlord's responsibility, with 3 kids, who with their parents working will have lots of time home alone, or she could lease to me, a mid-twenties young man, with high income and stability, and the kind of person who're generally quite chill about things, and will take the care to look after the house.
Now I lease the two rooms to an immigrant, and another man who came to my city to work because he couldn't find a job where his wife and kids currently live.
So you basically injected yourself as a pseudo-landlord, paying yourself with a free room. Makes sense - since you are living there it would be fairly easy to turn down a family (or conversely no family would likely want to share the house with you) whereas it would be tougher for the landlord to turn down a family in preference to a group of 3 unrelated people (discrimination laws and such). It's just that typically young families present themselves as better, more stable tenants than groups of people :)
