For Toni Bryant, it wasn't about how many people lived in the small brick ranch on Alcott Drive in a suburb just north of Atlanta. It was how they lived.

The garbage piled up on the curb on trash day. Cars and pallets were all over the front yard. When the children had lice, the adults brought them outside and scrubbed them with kerosene - a folk remedy for getting rid of the bugs.

"I have no qualms about people living together, but they have to keep their yard up or else all our property values suffer," says Ms. Bryant, peering across the neatly clipped lawns of the neighborhood.

In this genteel corner of what many call the New South because of its increasing diversity, others weren't as understanding. When someone in the neighborhood called the county code inspector, he found a dozen small cots lined up in the basement of a 1,300-square-foot house. As many as 15 members of one Mexican family had been living there at one time or another.

The owner, Jose Cruz Rodriguez, was fined $135 last fall for breaking a county occupancy law that limited the number of people who can live in a house, based on square footage. The extended family Mr. Rodriguez rented to was forced out of the home.

It's a story that's playing out across the South. In some counties, Hispanic immigration, most of it illegal, has increased a thousand-fold over the past 10 years, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. To handle the influx, elected officials in these areas are seeking to redefine the concept of family by limiting the number of people who are allowed to live under one roof.

In Cobb County, housing code officers say they need more stringent regulations to handle a growing number of complaints about overcrowded homes. Last week, county zoning officials proposed an ordinance to reduce the number of unrelated people who can live together under one roof from six to four.

Attempts to manage occupancy aren't new. College towns such as Chapel Hill, N.C., have rules about how many students can live together off campus. But from Cobb County, Ga., to Herndon County, Va., the focus is increasingly on Hispanic immigrants who interpret the term "mother-in-law apartment" very broadly.

Some critics say it is an attempt to implement local anti-immigration laws using housing policy.

"Counties and cities are saying, if the federal government doesn't do anything about [illegal immigration], we'll do it a different way, and housing is one thing they're looking at," says Edgar Rivera, a Hispanic activist in Fairfax, Va. "What they're doing is establishing laws that are specific to Hispanic people."

In Manassas, Va., for example, an ordinance that says residents have to prove consanguinity, or direct relationship to the homeowner, makes it illegal for too many great-grandparents, nephews, and uncles to live together. Enacted in December, the law was suspended in early January after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) threatened to file a lawsuit against it.

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