A housing unit, or dwelling unit, (at later mention often abbreviated to ''unit'') is a structure or the part of a structure or the space that is used as a home, residence, or sleeping place by one person or more people who maintain a common
household
A household consists of two or more persons who live in the same dwelling. It may be of a single family or another type of person group. The household is the basic unit of analysis in many social, microeconomic and government models, and is im ...
.
In common speech in Australia and New Zealand, the word "unit", when referring to housing, usually means an apartment, where a group of apartments is contained in one or more multi-storey buildings (an 'apartment block'), or a villa unit or home unit, where a group of dwellings is in one or more single-storey buildings, usually arranged around a driveway. Then, a unit is a self-contained suite of rooms, usually of modest scale, which may be attached, semi-detached or detached, within a group of similar dwellings. Used in the Australian and New Zealand urban planning and development industry, it is also a synonym for dwelling.
A single room unit is more commonly referred to as a
studio
A studio is an artist or worker's workroom. This can be for the purpose of acting, architecture, painting, pottery (ceramics), sculpture, origami, woodworking, scrapbooking, photography, graphic design, filmmaking, animation, industrial design ...
flat or
bedsit
A bedsit, bedsitter, or bed-sitting room is a form of accommodation common in some parts of the United Kingdom which consists of a single room per occupant with all occupants typically sharing a bathroom. Bedsits are included in a legal category ...
ter, otherwise known as a
Single Room Occupancy
Single room occupancy (more commonly abbreviated to SRO) is a form of housing that is typically aimed at residents with low or minimal incomes who rent small, furnished single rooms with a bed, chair, and sometimes a small desk. SRO units are ren ...
or SRO in North America.
In the United States, the US Census Bureau defines a housing unit as any single-family residential structure (like a house or a manufactured home) or any distinct unit in a multi-unit building where the unit provides privacy for the occupants, and the unit has access to the outside, and occupancy is independent of any institutional affiliation.
If there is an institutional affiliation or a restriction on who can live in a building, the building may instead be a group quarters facility.
In Canada,
Statistics Canada
Statistics Canada (StatCan; french: Statistique Canada), formed in 1971, is the agency of the Government of Canada commissioned with producing statistics to help better understand Canada, its population, resources, economy, society, and cultur ...
counts the number of private dwellings in the country at each census, in which case they are then known as "dwelling units" and can refer equally to a house or an apartment. In everyday Canadian English "unit" is used an umbrella term for apartments and condominiums.
See also
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Medium-density housing
Medium-density housing is a term used within urban planning and academic literature to refer to a category of residential development that falls between detached suburban housing and large multi-story buildings. There is no singular definition of m ...
*
Urban consolidation Urban consolidation describes the policy of constraining further development and population growth to within the boundaries of preexisting urban areas rather than expanding outward into suburban areas. Urban consolidation seeks to increase the popu ...
*
List of house types
This is a list of house types. Houses can be built in a large variety of configurations. A basic division is between free-standing or single-family detached homes and various types of attached or multi-family residential dwellings. Both may v ...
References
House types
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