Apartment

Apartments may be available for rent furnished, with furniture, or unfurnished into which a tenant moves in with his own furniture.

Laundry facilities may reside in a common area accessible to all building tenants, or each apartment may have its own facilities. Depending on when the building was built and its design, utilities such as water, heating, and electricity may be common for all of the apartments, or separate for each apartment and billed separately to each tenant. (Many areas in the US have ruled it illegal to split a water bill among all the tenants, especially if a pool is on the premises.) Outlets for connection to telephones are typically included in apartments. Telephone service is optional and is almost always billed separately from the rent payments. Cable television and similar amenities also cost extra. Parking space(s), air conditioning, and extra storage space may or may not be included with an apartment. Rental leases often limit the maximum number of residents in each apartment.^{[citation needed]}

On or around the ground floor of the apartment building, a series of mailboxes are typically kept in a location accessible to the public and, thus, to the mail carrier. Every unit typically gets its own mailbox with individual keys to it. Some very large apartment buildings with a full-time staff may take mail from the carrier and provide mail-sorting service. Near the mailboxes or some other location accessible by outsiders, a buzzer (equivalent to a doorbell) may be available for each individual unit. In smaller apartment buildings such as two- or three-flats, or even four-flats, rubbish is often disposed of in trash containers similar to those used at houses. In larger buildings, rubbish is often collected in a common trash bin or dumpster. For cleanliness or minimizing noise, many lessors will place restrictions on tenants regarding smoking or keeping pets in an apartment.^{[citation needed]}

Various

Small apartments often have only one entrance.^[citation needed] Large apartments often have two entrances, perhaps a door in the front and another in the back, or from an underground or otherwise attached parking structure. Depending on the building design, the entrance doors may be connected directly to the outside or to a common area inside, such as a hallway or a lobby.^{[citation needed]}

In many American cities, the

In

By the 16th century, the current Cairo also had high-rise apartment buildings, in which the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple stories above them were rented out to tenants.^[34]

Yemen

High-rise apartment buildings were built in the Yemeni city of Shibam in the 16th century. The houses of Shibam are all made out of mud bricks, but about 500 of them are tower houses, which rise 5 to 11 stories high,^[35] with each floor having one or two apartments.^[36][37] Shibam has been called "Manhattan of the desert".^[37] Some of them were over 100 feet (30 m) high, thus being the tallest mudbrick apartment buildings in the world to this day.^[38]

Ancient China

The Hakka people in southern China adopted communal living structures designed to be easily defensible, in the form of Weilongwu (围龙屋) and Tulou (土楼). The latter are large, enclosed and fortified earth buildings, between three and five stories high and housing up to eighty families.

Current examples

England

In London, by the time of the 2011 census, 52 per cent of all homes were flats.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the concept of the flat was slow to catch on amongst the British middle classes, which generally followed the north European standard of single-family houses dating far back into history. Those who lived in flats were assumed to be lower class and somewhat itinerant, renting for example a "flat above a shop" as part of a lease agreement for a tradesman. In London and most of Britain, everyone who could afford to do so occupied an entire house—even if this was a small terraced house—while the working poor continued to rent rooms in often overcrowded properties, with one (or more) families per room.

During the last quarter of the 19th century, as wealth increased, ideas began to change. Both urban growth and the increase in population meant that more imaginative housing concepts would be needed if the middle and upper classes were to maintain a pied-à-terre in the capital. The traditional London town house was becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. For bachelors and unmarried women in particular, the idea of renting a modern mansion flat became increasingly popular.

The first mansion flats in England were:

• Albert Mansions, which Philip Flower constructed and
  Sir Arthur Sullivan and Lord Alfred Tennyson, whose connections with the developer's family were long-standing. Philip Flower's son, Cyril Flower, developed most of the mansion blocks on Prince of Wales Drive, London
  .
• Albert Hall Mansions, designed by Richard Norman Shaw in 1876. Because this was a new type of housing, Shaw reduced risks as much as possible; each block was planned as a separate project, with the building of each part contingent on the successful occupation of every flat in the previous block. The gamble paid off and was a success.

Scotland

In

In 1839, the first New York City

Blind Man's Alley bear its name for a reason. Until little more than a year ago its dark burrows harbored a colony of blind beggars, tenants of a blind landlord, old Daniel Murphy, whom every child in the ward knows, if he never heard of the President of the United States. "Old Dan" made a big fortune—he told me once four hundred thousand dollars—out of his alley and the surrounding tenements, only to grow blind himself in extreme old age, sharing in the end the chief hardship of the wretched beings whose lot he had stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth. Even when the Board of Health at last compelled him to repair and clean up the worst of the old buildings, under threat of driving out the tenants and locking the doors behind them, the work was accomplished against the old man's angry protests. He appeared in person before the Board to argue his case, and his argument was characteristic. "I have made my will," he said. "My monument stands waiting for me in Calvary. I stand on the very brink of the grave, blind and helpless, and now (here the pathos of the appeal was swept under in a burst of angry indignation) do you want me to build and get skinned, skinned? These people are not fit to live in a nice house. Let them go where they can, and let my house stand." In spite of the genuine anguish of the appeal, it was downright amusing to find that his anger was provoked less by the anticipated waste of luxury on his tenants than by distrust of his own kind, the builder. He knew intuitively what to expect. The result showed that Mr. Murphy had gauged his tenants correctly.^[44]

Many campaigners, such as Upton Sinclair and Jacob Riis, pushed for reforms in tenement dwellings. As a result, the New York State Tenement House Act was passed in 1901 to improve the conditions. More improvements followed. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949 to clean slums and reconstruct housing units for the poor.

The Dakota (1884) was one of the first luxury apartment buildings in New York City. The majority, however, remained tenements.

Some significant developments in architectural design of apartment buildings came out of the 1950s and 1960s. Among them were groundbreaking designs in the

In the United States, "tenement" is a label usually applied to the less expensive, more basic rental apartment buildings in older sections of large cities. Many of these apartment buildings are "walk-ups"[45] without an elevator, and some have shared bathing facilities, though this is becoming less common. The slang term "dingbat" is used to describe cheap urban apartment buildings from the 1950s and 1960s with unique and often wacky façades to differentiate themselves within a full block of apartments. They are often built on stilts, and with parking underneath.

Canada

Apartments were popular in Canada, particularly in urban centres like Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Hamilton in the 1950s to 1970s. By the 1980s, many multi-unit buildings were being constructed as

The earliest apartment buildings were in the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne as the response to fast rising land values–both cities are home to the two oldest surviving apartment buildings in the country, Kingsclere in Potts Point, and The Canterbury Flats in St Kilda. Melbourne Mansions on Collins Street, Melbourne (now demolished), built in 1906 for mostly wealthy residents is believed by many to be the earliest. Today the oldest surviving self-contained apartment buildings are in the St Kilda area including the Fawkner Mansions (1910), Majestic Mansions (1912 as a boarding house) and the Canterbury (1914—the oldest surviving buildings contained flats).^[48] Kingsclere, built in 1912 is believed to be the earliest apartment building in Sydney and still survives.^[49]

During the interwar years, apartment building continued in inner Melbourne (particularly in areas such as St Kilda and

In other cities, apartment building was almost solely restricted to public housing. Public housing in Australia was common in the larger cities, particularly in Melbourne (by the Housing Commission of Victoria) where a number of high-rise housing commission flats were built between the 1950s and 1970s by successive governments as part of an urban renewal program. Areas affected included Fitzroy, Flemington, Collingwood, Carlton, Richmond and Prahran. Similar projects were run in Sydney's lower socio-economic areas like Redfern.

In the 1980s, modern apartment buildings sprang up in riverside locations in Brisbane (along the Brisbane River) and Perth (along the Swan River).

In Melbourne, in the 1990s, a trend began for apartment buildings without the requirement of spectacular views. As a continuation of the

Despite their size, other smaller cities including Canberra, Darwin, Townsville, Cairns, Newcastle, Wollongong, Adelaide and Geelong have begun building apartments in the 2000s.

Today, residential buildings such as the Eureka Tower and Q1 are among the tallest in the country.

• 
  The skyline of the Gold Coast in Queensland is dominated by apartments.
• 
  The Canterbury in St Kilda, Victoria is one of the earliest surviving apartment buildings in Australia.
• 
  green design

South Korea

As of 2019, a majority of Koreans live in apartments.^[50] Since the 1980s, the number of apartment residents has soared, and as the number of apartments has steadily increased, apartments have become a representative form of residence where more than half of the Korean population resides.

It is the most common house in small and medium-sized cities in Korea, and even these days, apartments are quite visible in rural areas such as remote areas. This is because small and medium-sized construction companies have technology, but they lack the capital to build large complexes in large cities. The better the location, the more expensive the apartment is, and the more expensive the apartment complex built by a large construction company^[51] and with a large number of households. Also, even the same type of flat in the same complex is not all of the same price. Due to problems such as the right to sunlight and prospects, the low-rise households on the first and third floors are generally the cheapest, and the higher they go, the more expensive they become.^[52] In addition, the price varies depending on other conditions such as the viewing area and the direction of the house, such as south, east, west, and north. The upper floors with a south-facing view are the most expensive. Apartment sales and lease prices are actually the largest and most stable assets owned by a middle-class family in Korea, symbolizing the social status of a family, which forms a class and determines life satisfaction. For this reason, the Korean people have no choice but to react very sensitively to apartment prices.^[53]

Notes

See also

• Condominium
• Kamienica
  in Poland
• List of house types
• Polykatoikia
  in Greece

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Apartments.

• The dictionary definition of apartment at Wiktionary