A common area is, in real estate or real property law, the "area which is available for use by more than one person..." The common areas are those "within a building that are available for common use by all tenants, (or) groups of tenants and their invitees." In Texas and other parts of the United States, it is "An area inside a housing development that is owned by all residents or by an overall management structure which charges each tenant for maintenance and upkeep."
Common areas often exist in apartments, gated communities, condominiums, cooperatives and shopping malls.
In any situation where there is a tenancy in common, all the tenants in common collectively own the common areas.
This differs from a commons or common land, as used in English law, which is owned by one person, but which may be used by a group of persons.
Read more about Common Area: Examples, Case Law, Residence Halls, Business Spaces, Real Estate Taxation of Common Areas
Famous quotes containing the words common and/or area:
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new—but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
—Hannah Arendt (20th century)
“If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)