Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

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> Not sure where you're from, but in most of the US "apartments" are not assets, but liabilities: tenants don't own them, but rent them.

A rented apartment is a liability to the tenant, but an asset to the landlord. And whether a residence is rented or owner-occupied isn't an inherent property of the residence, since it can change over time–it isn't uncommon (for a person of sufficient means) to buy a new house/apartment/etc and then rent out the old one instead of selling it.

> We generally call them "condos" when owned.

Is this a peculiarity of American English? In Australian English, "apartment" is about the type of physical structure, and has nothing to do with the building's legal structure. (What Americans call "condominiums", Australians call "strata title", but it is essentially the same thing–newer apartment buildings are almost all strata title, but older buildings sometimes have other ownership structures, for example company title.)

Thought it was pretty obvious we were talking about the tenant, not the landlord. This is such weird nitpicking. When people in the US talk about apartments, they're almost always rented. The only place I've ever heard someone say "I bought my apartment" is New York, but even that is just vernacular, because the governing body is some sort of association or condo board.

I tell you this as an American who's spent enough decades on this earth hearing English, American apartments are rented 99.9% of the time.

> The only place I've ever heard someone say "I bought my apartment" is New York, but even that is just vernacular, because the governing body is some sort of association or condo board.

It's not "just vernacular", it is perfectly proper formal English. For many non-Americans – and even it seems many Americans too – calling something an "apartment" says nothing about the legal structure of building ownership.

I can find heaps of American news stories about people in the US buying apartments. Random example, this 2007 story from Fox News about the disappearance of a college student in Madison, Wisconsin [0]. It says regarding the victim that "Nolan, originally from Waunakee, had recently bought an apartment and moved to Madison from Whitewater, where she went to school". If Fox News is talking about people buying apartments in Madison, Wisconsin, then it is perfectly normal American English. Much more convincing than random Americans on HN telling me it isn't.

[0] https://www.foxnews.com/story/cops-look-at-bars-surveillance...

I guess this is the .1% then, as the article refers to her "9 apartments", which I presume were not tenanted.

For the record - to non Americans (both the majority of the world and the majority of the english speaking world) - "apartment" refers to the type of dwelling, not the ownership status. For many readers this localised hidden meaning in a common term is not obvious.

In the US, "apartment" at least strongly implies rented. You'd normally say condo (or co-op) if you own. (ADDED: Or just "my place" or something like that generically.)

Then again that sentence did say “to buy as many as nine additional apartments”.

The terminology is a bit loose but it would probably be more customary to write "buy as many as nine additional units." If I invite you to "my apartment" the implication is that I'm renting although that's not an absolute.

> If I invite you to "my apartment" the implication is that I'm renting

What am I, your invited guest, to do with this information? If someone else invites me to "their condo" should I behave differently?

Nothing. It's just that, in the US, when you're renting a unit that isn't a whole house, you tend to call it an apartment as opposed to something else. It's just conventional word usage at least today.

Does choosing a word that implies something not imply some kind of intent in wanting to have the receiver take something from what was implied?

Perhaps there is some kind of social embarrassment in renting and thus apartment owners have come to try and differentiate themselves by using what originated as a legal term?

The year was 1979. "Condo" was only starting to see some use in the vernacular and took quite a lot longer to become the norm.

Homeownership wasn't always the obsession we know it to be today.

But would the landlord call it an "apartment"?

If they owned one unit, they'd probably say they owned a condo and were renting out an apartment (or they're renting out their condo).

> If they owned one unit, they'd probably say they owned a condo and were renting out an apartment

That sounds really confusing – owning one thing, but are talking about it as if it were two separate things. Does anyone actually talk that way?

To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87:

"No."

I think “condo” usually implies owning a property within some shared structure where you need to pay additional fees (e.g. an HOA).

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