List of House Types - Attached Multi-unit Housing

Attached Multi-unit Housing

Specific terms under various American federal, state, or local laws dealing with fair housing, truth in advertising, and so forth, have been prescribed and engender specific legal meanings. For example, in American housing codes, all "apartments" must contain a kitchen, bathing facilities, and a sleeping area, or else that term may not be used. This generates various differences within the English-speaking world, and the terms such as "single-family", "two-family", or "three-family" building, residence, house, home, or property can be generic and thus convey little or no building plan (style of building) information. Such terminology is most common in advertising and real-estate markets that offer leasing of such units, or sales of such buildings.

• Apartment: a relatively self-contained housing unit in a building which is often rented out to one person or a family, or two or more people sharing a lease in a partnership, for their exclusive use. Sometimes called a flat or digs (slang). Some locales have legal definitions of what constitutes an apartment. In some locations, "apartment" denotes a building that was built specifically for such units, whereas "flat" denotes a unit in a building that had been originally built as a single-family house, but later on subdivided into some multi-unit house type.

• Apartment building, Block of flats: a multi-unit dwelling made up of several (generally four or more) apartments. Contrast this with the two-family house and the three-family dwelling.

• Aul: a type of fortified village found throughout the Caucasus Mountains, especially in Dagestan.

• Barracks: a type of military housing, formerly connoting a large "open bay" with rows of bunk beds and attached bathroom facilities, but during the most recent several decades for the American Armed Forces most of the new housing units for unmarried servicemen have been constructed with a dormitory-style layout housing two to four servicemembers. This dormitory-styling providing additional privacy has been found to promote the retention of trained personnel in the all-volunteer Armed Forces of the United States.

• Basement apartment

• Brownstone: a Northeastern United States type of housing unit: see rowhouse.

• Bedsit: A British expression (short for bed-sitting room) for a single-roomed dwelling in a sub-divided larger house. The standard type contains a kitchenette or basic cooking facilities in a combined bedroom/living area, with a separate bathroom and lavatory shared between a number of rooms. Once common in older Victorian properties in British cities, they are less frequently found since the 1980s as a result of tenancy reforms, property prices and renovation grants that favour the refurbishment of such properties into self-contained flats for leasehold sale.

• Choultry: a South-Indian Hindu-Caravanserai

• Cluster house: an older form of the Q-type house (see below)

• Condominium: a form of ownership with individual apartments for everyone, and co-ownership (by percentages) of all of the common areas, such as corridors, hallways, stairways, lobbies, recreation rooms, porches, rooftops, and any outdoor areas of the grounds of the buildings.

• Deck access: a block of "flats" which are accessed from a walkway that is open to the elements.

• Flat: In Great Britain and Ireland, this means exactly the same as an "apartment". In and around San Francisco, Calif., this term means an apartment that takes up an entire floor of a large house, usually one that has been converted from an older Victorian house.

• 2-Flat, 3-Flat, and 4-Flat houses: Houses or buildings with 2, 3, or 4 flats, respectively, especially when each of the flats takes up one entire floor of the house. There is a common stairway in the front and often in the back providing access to all the flats. 2-Flats and sometimes 3-flats are common in certain older neighborhoods.

• Four Plus One: an apartment building consisting of four stories above a parking lot. The four floors containing the apartment units are of wood-frame and masonry construction. It was particularly popular in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s, especially on the city's north side.

• Garage-apartment: an apartment over a garage; if the garage is attached, the apartment will have a separate entrance from the main house.

• Garalow: a portmanteau word "garage" + "bungalow"; similar to a garage-apartment, but with the apartment and garage at the same level.

• Garden apartment: a building style usually characterized by two story, semi-detached buildings, each floor being a separate apartment.

• Garden flat: a flat which is at garden (ground) level in a multilevel house or apartment building, especially in the case of Georgian and Victorian terraced housing which has been sub-divided into separate dwellings.

• Housing cooperative (or Co-op): a form of ownership in which a non-profit corporation owns the entire apartment building or development and residents own shares in the corporation that correspond to their apartment and a percentage of common areas. In Australia this corresponds with a "company title" apartment.

• Housing project: a North American term for government-owned housing for low-income tenants (aka Public housing or Social housing).

• Live Work: a townhouse / row house having a retail, office or workshop on the ground floor with living premises of the building proprietor and occupier (the one person) of the ground floor commercial space above e.g. like the traditional high street Victorian grocer. Normally with fire rated separation.

• Ksar: a village consisting of generally attached houses, widespread among the oasis populations of the Maghreb (northern Africa)
• Loft or warehouse conversion can be an apartment building wherein part of the unit, usually consisting of the bedroom(s) and/or a second bedroom level bath is sub-divided vertically within the structurally tall bay between the structural floors of a former factory or warehouse building. The lofts created in such are locally supported by columns and bearing walls and not part of the overall original load bearing structure.

• Maisonette: an apartment / flat on two levels with internal stairs, or which has its own entrance at street level.

• Mess: a building or flat with single bedroom per tenant and shared facilities like toilets and kitchens. These are popular with students, bachelors or low wage earners in the Indian subcontinent. It is similar to the bedsit in the UK. Some variants include multiple tenants per bedroom and inclusion of a centralized maid service or cooked meals with tenancy.

• Mother-in-law apartment: small apartment either at the back, in the basement, or on an upper level subdivision of the main house, usually with a separate entrance (also known as a "Granny flat" in the UK, Australia and New Zealand). If it is a separate structure from the main house, it is called a 'granny cottage' or a 'doddy house'. Such Secondary suites are often efficiency or two room apartments but always have kitchen facilities (which is usually a legal requirement of any apartment).

• Officetel: small apartment providing a combined work and living area in one place, especially in South Korea.

• Penthouse: the top floor of multi-story building

• Plattenbau (East German) / Panelák (Czech, Slovak): a communist-era tower block that is made of slabs of concrete put together.

• Q-type: townhouse built mainly in housing estates in the UK beginning in the late 20th century. The houses are arranged in blocks of four with each house at a corner of the block. Similar to the earlier cluster house (see above).

• Railroad apartment (or railroad flat): a type of apartment that is in a building built on a very narrow lot (usually about as wide as a railroad car, or Pullman car sections thereof).

• Rooming house: a type of Single Room Occupancy building where most washing, kitchen and laundry facilities are shared between residents, which may also share a common suite of living rooms and dining room, with or without board arrangements. When board is provided (no longer common), a common dining time and schedule is imposed by the landlord who in such cases also serves as an innkeeper of sorts. In Australia and the United States, any housing accommodation with 4 or more bedrooms can be regarded as a rooming house if each bedroom is subject to individual tenancy agreements. In the U.S., rooming house lease agreements typically run for very short periods, usually week to week, or a few days at a time. Transient housing arrangements for longer term tenancies are implemented by a "rider" on a case by case basis, if local laws permit.

• Rowhouse (USA); also called "Terraced home" (USA); also called "Townhouse": 3 or more houses in a row sharing a "party" wall with its adjacent neighbour. In New York and Boston, "Brownstones" are rowhouses. Rowhouses are typically multiple stories. The term townhouse is currently coming into wider use in the UK, but terraced house (not "terraced home") is more common.

• Shophouse: the name given in Southeast Asia to a terraced two to five story urban building featuring a shop or other public activity on the street level, with residential accommodation on upper floors.

• Single Room Occupancy or SRO: a studio apartment, usually occurring with a block of many similar apartments, intended for use as public housing. They may or may not have their own washing, laundry, and kitchen facilities. In the United States, lack of kitchen facilities prevents use of the term "apartment", so such would be classified as a boarding house or hotel.

• Six-pack: In New England (USA), this refers to a stick-built block of 6 apartments comprising (duplexed) two three story Triple deckers built side by side sharing one wall, a common roof, lot, yards (lawns and gardens, if any), parking arrangements, and basement, but possessing separately metered electric, and separate hot water and heating or air conditioning. In Australia, it refers to a style of apartments that were constructed during the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, usually comprising a single, masonry-built block containing 4 to 8 walk-up apartments (though sometimes, many more), of between 2 and 3 stories in height, with car parking at the side or rear.

• Studio apartment or Studio flat (UK), or Bachelor apartment or Efficiency apartment: a suite with a single room that doubles as living/sitting room and bedroom, with a kitchenette and bath squeezed in off to one side. The unit is designed for a single occupant or possibly a couple. Especially in Canada and South Africa, also called bachelor, or bachelorette if very small.

• Tenement: a multi-unit dwelling usually of frame construction, quite often brick veneered, made up of several (generally many more than four to six) apartments (i.e. a large apartment building) that can be up to five stories. Tenements do not generally have elevators. In the United States the connotation sometimes implies a run-down or poorly-cared-for building. It often refers to a very large apartment building usually constructed during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century era sited in cities or company towns.

• Terraced house: Since the late 18th century is a style of housing where (generally) identical individual houses are conjoined into rows - a line of houses which abut directly on to each other built with shared party walls between dwellings whose uniform fronts and uniform height created an ensemble that was more stylish than a "rowhouse". However this is also the UK term for a "rowhouse" regardless of whether the houses are identical or not.
  • Back-to-back: Terraced houses which also adjoin a second terrace to the rear. They were a common form of housing for workers during the Industrial Revolution in England.

• Tower block or Apartment tower: a high-rise apartment building.

• Townhouse: also called Rowhouse (US). In the UK, a townhouse is a traditional term for an upper class house in London (in contrast with country house), and is now coming into use as a term for new terraced houses, which are often three or more stories tall and may include a garage on the ground floor.
  • Stacked townhouse: Units are stacked on each other; units may be multilevel; all units have direct access from the outside.

• Three family home or Three family house — U.S. real estate and advertising term for several configurations of apartment classed dwelling buildings including:
  • Triple decker: a three-family apartment house, usually of frame construction, in which all three apartment units are stacked on top of one another. (For additional characteristics, also see Multifamily home features below.)
  • Two decker: a two family house consisting of stacked apartments that frequently have similar or identical floor plans. Some two deckers, usually ones starting as single family homes, have one or both floors sub-divided and are therefore three or four-family dwellings. Some have external stairways giving a totally separate entrance, and some, usually those which have been a single family house now sub-divided, are similar to the Maisonette plan but sharing a common external 'main entrance' door and lock, and a main internal hall with stairways letting to the separate apartments. (For additional characteristics, also see Multifamily home features below.)
• Tyneside flat: a pair of single-storey flats in a two-storey terrace, distinctively with two separate front doors to the street rather than a shared lobby. Notably found on Tyneside, North Eastern England.

Multifamily home features

• Tenants usually have some portion of the basement and/or common attic.
• Fire regulations aggressively require a separate emergency egress for all apartments under U.S. laws and national fire codes.
• Utilities are either paid as part of the rent, or (now predominant) the units have separately provided heat, air conditioning, electrical distribution panels and meters, and sometimes (uncommonly) water metering, separating all secondary housing costs by rental unit. Common lighting may or may not be off a separate meter and circuitry in subdivided former single family dwellings.
• leasehold documents will specify other common factors such as specific parking rights, rights to common spaces such as lawn and gardens on the premises, storage or garage (usually a detached unit, that cannot economically be converted into an additional housing unit) facilities and details such as who has responsibility for upkeep, snow removal, lawn care, and so forth.

• Tong Lau: a type of shophouse found in southern China.

• Unit: a type of Medium-density housing found in Australia and New Zealand.

• Vatara: a housing complex, mainly found in urban Karnataka, India, similar to an apartment complex, but with mostly two stories and homes in a row on each floor.