tenement

n.

1. A building for human habitation, especially one that is rented to tenants.
2. A rundown, low-rental apartment building whose facilities and maintenance barely meet minimum standards.
3. Chiefly British. An apartment or room leased to a tenant.
4. Law. Property, such as land, rents, or franchises, held by one person leasing it from another.

[Middle English, house, from Old French, from Medieval Latin tenēmentum, from Latin tenēre, to hold.]

tenemental ten'e·men'tal (-mĕn'tl) adj.

A housing structure that has several houses or units put together, often called an apartment. The word "tenement" was used most frequently many years ago to reference housing usually inhabited by lower income families. These buildings are simple rental properties that are more practical for those unable to afford a house or for those who would like to live in an area, such as city centers, where there are no houses to purchase.

Investopedia Says:
A tenement is any type of property, such as an estate or land, that is owned by one person and leased to another. Although a tenement has many units attached together under one roof, they are divided by walls to give each family or occupant his or her own space and privacy. The rental agreement usually involves a contract that specifies the period the apartment will be leased out to the renter (or tenant) and the cost of renting the property.

Tenements are picking up in popularity as housing costs rise and people move closer into the city center (or downtown) to save money on transportation, mortgage costs, house renovations and taxes.

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Permanent and fixed property, including both corporeal and incorporeal real property. In modern usage, tenement applies to any structure attached to land and also to any kind of dwelling inhabited by a tenant. Tenement is frequently used to mean dilapidated apartment dwellings.

1. possessions that are permanent and fixed; structures attached to land.
Example: Real property consists of tenements and hereditaments: tenements are the physical and legal property that may be enjoyed by the owner; hereditaments are property one can pass on to one's heirs.

2. Older apartment units.
Example: In the inner city, many people live in tenements.

A building having multiple housing units for rent; often, ill-maintained, overcrowded units that may barely meet minimum code requirements for safety and sanitation; usually built many years earlier and found in poorer sections of a city.

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The New York City Tenement House Act of 1867 defined a tenement as any rented or leased dwelling that housed more than three independent families. Tenements were first built to house the waves of immigrants that arrived in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, and they represented the primary form of urban working-class housing until the New Deal.

A typical tenement building was from five to six stories high, with four apartments on each floor. To maximize the number of renters, builders wasted little space. Early tenements might occupy as much as 90 percent of their lots, leaving little room behind the building for privies and water pumps and little ventilation, light, or privacy inside the tenement. With a large extended family and regular boarders to help pay the rent, which could otherwise eat up over half of a family's income, a tenement apartment might house as many as from ten to twelve people at a time. These tenement residents often also worked in the building in such occupations as cigar rolling and garment making.

From the beginning, reformers attacked tenement conditions. In New York City, early attempts at reform included fire-prevention measures, the creation of a Department of Survey and Inspection of Buildings in 1862, and the founding of the Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866. Meanwhile, city tenements were getting increasingly crowded: by 1864, approximately 480,400 of New York City's more than 700,000 residents lived in some 15,300 tenement buildings.

New York State passed a Tenement House Law on 14 May 1867, the nation's first comprehensive housing reform law. It established the first standards for minimum room size, ventilation, and sanitation. It required fire escapes and at least one toilet or privy (usually outside) for every twenty inhabitants. However, enforcement was lax.

An 1879 amendment to the 1867 legislation required more open space on a building lot and stipulated that all tenement rooms open onto a street, rear yard, or air shaft. The measure was designed to increase ventilation and fight diseases, such as tuberculosis, that ravaged tenement neighborhoods. To meet the standards of the 1879 law, builders designed the "dumbbell tenement" with narrow airshafts on each side to create a dumbbell-like shape from above. Despite slightly better fireproofing and ventilation, reformers attacked these buildings as only a limited improvement on existing conditions.

In 1890, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives rallied middle-class reformers to the cause of improving tenement life. His photos and essays drew attention to the health and housing problems of tenement neighborhoods.

The most significant New York State law to improve deteriorating tenement conditions was the Tenement Act of 1901, promoted by a design competition and exhibition held by the Charity Organization Society in 1900. By that time, the city's Lower East Side was home to the most densely populated buildings on earth. The neighborhood's Tenth Ward had a population of 69,944, approximately 665 people per acre.

The 1901 legislation, opposed by the real estate industry on the grounds that it would discourage new construction, improved tenement buildings. The law mandated better lighting and fireproofing. Most important, it required that privies be replaced with indoor toilet facilities connected to the city sewers, with one toilet for every two apartments.

Beginning in the New Deal era, reformers' strategies changed. Drawing on a tradition of "model tenements" and new government interest in housing construction, reformers designed public housing projects. Their plans emphasized open space, much as an earlier generation had passed laws to provide more light and fresh air for urban working-class families. The imposed standards, however, often created new problems. Building closures and slum clearance displaced many working-class families, while new high-rise public Housing often fell victim to segregation and neglect. Although reformers continued to attack working-class living conditions, social pressures sustained many of the problems of poverty and overcrowding.

Bibliography

Bauman, John F., Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian. From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

Day, Jared N. Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Ford, James. Slums and Housing, with Special Reference to New York City: History, Conditions, Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.

Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. New York: Blackwell, 1988.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Home page at http://www.tenement.org.

Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. New York: Scribners, 1890.

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

A comprehensive legal term for any type of property of a permanent nature— including land, houses, and other buildings as well as rights attaching thereto, such as the right to collect rent.

In the law of easements, a dominant tenement or estate is that for which the advantage or benefit of an easement exists; a servient tenement or estate is a tenement that is subject to the burden of an easement.

The term tenement is also used in reference to a building with rooms or apartments that are leased for residential purposes. It is frequently defined by statute, and its meaning therefore varies from one jurisdiction to another.

IN BRIEF: A room, apartment, or building that is rented to a person or group.

I inhabit a week, frail, decayed tenement; battered by the winds and broken in on by the storms, and, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair. — John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - lejlighed, beboelse, lejekaserne

Nederlands (Dutch)
gebouw met huurwoningen

Français (French)
n. - immeuble ancien (délabré et insalubre)

Deutsch (German)
n. - Mietshaus, (Miet)wohnung, Besitz

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κατοικία, οίκημα, λαϊκή πολυκατοικία

Italiano (Italian)
podere, casamento

Português (Portuguese)
n. - prédio (m) ou casa (f) de moradia, morada (f), casa (f) de cômodos

Русский (Russian)
арендованная земля, арендованное имущество, снимаемая квартира, сдаваемый в аренду дом, жилище, (поэт.) обитель

Español (Spanish)
n. - casa de vecindad, propiedad, vivienda

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - bostadshus, hyreshus, bostad, våning, lägenhet

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
房屋, 租户, 住户

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 房屋, 租戶, 住戶

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 보유 재산, 주택, 자유 보유권

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 保有財産, 借地

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مسكن, شقه في مبنى‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮דירה, בית, בית-משותף, בית-דירות, אחוזה‬

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