Tenement

In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other (such as Gladstone's Land).

Tenements with one- or two-room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped.

In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.

[1] In the United States, the term tenement initially meant a large building with multiple small spaces to rent.

With rapid urban growth and immigration, overcrowded houses with poor sanitation gave tenements a reputation as shanty towns.

The New York State legislature defined it in the Tenement House Act of 1867 in terms of rental occupancy by multiple households, as Any house, building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased, let, or hired out to be occupied or is occupied, as the home or residence of more than three families living independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the premises, or by more than two families upon a floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets, or privies, or some of them.

[16] In parts of the Lower East Side, buildings were older and had courtyards, generally occupied by machine shops, stables, and other businesses.

[11] One reason New York had so many tenements was the large number of immigrants; another was that the grid plan on which streets were laid out, and the economic practice of building on individual 25-by-100-foot (7.6 by 30.5 m) lots, combined to produce high land coverage.

[18] Prior to 1867, tenements often covered more than 90 percent of the lot, were five or six stories high, and had 18 rooms per floor, of which only two received direct sunlight.

[19] The Tenement House Act of 1866, the state legislature's first comprehensive legislation on housing conditions, prohibited cellar apartments unless the ceiling was 1 foot (30 cm) above street level; required one water closet per 20 residents and the provision of fire escapes; and paid some attention to space between buildings.

As of 1869, New York State law defined a "tenement house" as "any house or building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased let or hired out, to be occupied, or is occupied as the home or residence of three families or more living independently of each other, and doing their cooking upon the premises, or by more than two families upon any floor, so living and cooking, but having a right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets or privies, or some of them."

[26] The New York State Assembly Tenement House Committee report of 1894 surveyed 8,000 buildings with approximately 255,000 residents and found New York to be the most densely populated city in the world, at an average of 143 inhabitants per acre (350/ha), with part of the Lower East Side having 800 inhabitants per acre (2,000/ha), denser than Bombay.

These rules are still the basis of New York City law on low-rise buildings, and they have made single-lot development uneconomical.

Edinburgh's tenements are much older, dating from the 17th century onwards, and some were up to 15 storeys high when first built, which made them among the tallest houses in the world at that time.

[34][35] Buildings within the courtyards were the location of much of Berlin's industry until the 1920s, and noise and other nuisances affected the apartments, only the best of which had windows facing the street.

[36] One notorious Berlin Mietskaserne was Meyers Hof [de] in Gesundbrunnen,[37] which at times housed 2,000 people and required its police officer to keep order.

[40] Also, apartments were laid out with their rooms reached via a common internal corridor, which even the Berlin Architects' Association recognized was unhealthy and detrimental to family life.

[44] Many tenement buildings were originally the Georgian townhouses of upper-class families, neglected and subdivided over the centuries to house dozens of Dublin's poor.

[50] In Buenos Aires, the tenements, called conventillos, developed from subdividing one- or two-story houses built around courtyards for well-off families.

In Montevideo, Uruguay, the tenements, called conventillos, emerged from the end of the 19th century, due to the rapid increase in the city's population caused by the massive arrival of immigrants and the settlement of people from other areas of the country, especially from the countryside.

[54][55] The now demolished Conventillo Mediomundo located in Barrio Sur was one of the most emblematic, as it was a central hub for the Afro-Uruguayan community and for candombe music and dance.

[56] In the conventillos, social gatherings were organized where tango was danced, which arose from the mixture of the different cultures of the working class people who lived in these collective dwellings.

A frequent practice is for the kitchen to also serve as a bedroom for a newly married couple in order to give them some degree of privacy.

Kamienica (plural kamienice) is a Polish term describing a type of residential tenement building made of brick or stone, with at least two floors.

Later in the 20th century, especially after the Second World War, large apartments would be divided into several smaller flats due to general lack of habitable space caused by vast destruction of cities, thus lowering the generally high standard of living in so-called grand city tenements (Polish: kamienice wielkomiejskie).