Apartment Living
An apartment (in US English) or flat (in British English) is a
self-contained lodging unit that occupies only part of a construction. Such
a construction may be called an apartment building, especially if it
consists of many apartments for rent. Apartments may be owned by an
owner/inhabitant or borrowed by tenants.
The term apartment is preferential in North America, while the term altitude
is usually, but not completely, used in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and
mainly Commonwealth countries. In Malaysian English, flat often denotes a
housing block of less important quality destined for lower-income groups,
while apartment is more general and may also include lavishness
condominiums.
Tenement law refers to the feudal basis of enduring property such as ground
or rents. May be found collective as in "Messuage or Tenement" to include
all the land, buildings and other possessions of a property.
In the US, some apartment-dwellers possess their own apartments, moreover as
co-ops, in which the residents own shares of a business that owns the
building or enlargement; or in condominiums, whose inhabitants own their
apartments and share possession of the public spaces. Most apartments are in
buildings premeditated for the purpose, but large older houses are sometimes
divided into apartments. The word apartment connotes a residential unit or
subdivision in a building. In some locations, predominantly the United
States, the word denotes a rental unit owned by the building owner, and is
not on average second-hand for a condominium.