page_title: Condominium
section_title: United States of America
hierarchical_section_title: Condominium / By country / United States of America
caption_attribution_description: English: The interior of a loft condominium at 400 South Green Street in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
context_page_description: A condominium, often shortened to condo in the United States and in most Canadian provinces, is a type of living space similar to an apartment but independently sellable and therefore regarded as real estate. The condominium building structure is divided into several units that are each separately owned, surrounded by common areas that are jointly owned. Condominiums are a type of common-interest development. Similar concepts in other English-speaking countries include strata title in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and the Canadian province of British Columbia; commonhold in the United Kingdom; and sectional title in South Africa.
  Residential condominiums are frequently constructed as ordinary apartment buildings, but there has been an increase in the number of "detached condominiums", which look like single-family homes but in which the yards, corridors, building exteriors, and streets as well as any recreational facilities, are jointly owned and jointly maintained by a community association.
  Unlike apartments, which are leased by their tenants, condominium units are owned outright.
context_section_description: The first condominium law passed in the United States of America was in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1958. In 1960, the first condominium in the continental U.S. was built in Salt Lake City, Utah. The legal concept had spread to the U.S. from Europe via the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and Cuba) but throughout the 1960s it was widely and erroneously reported that the concept had arisen in the U.S. directly based on a Roman model. In fact, the concept of an estate in the air was antithetical to Roman law, and there is no evidence of an ancient Roman condominio.
  Section 234 of the Housing Act of 1961 allowed the Federal Housing Administration to insure mortgages on condominiums, leading to a vast increase in the funds available for condominiums, and to condominium laws in every state by 1969. Since then, the term ‘condominium’, or ‘condo’ for short, has become a household word in the U.S.. Many Americans' first widespread awareness of condominium life came not from its largest cities but from South Florida, where developers had imported the condominium concept from Puerto Rico and used it to sell thousands of inexpensive homes to retirees arriving flush with cash from the urban northern U.S.
  The primary attraction to this type of ownership is the ability to obtain affordable housing in a highly desirable area that typically is beyond economic reach. Additionally, such properties benefit from having restrictions that maintain and enhance value, providing control over blight that plagues some neighborhoods.
  Over the past several decades, the residential condominium industry has been booming in some metropolitan areas, such as Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles and New York City.  However, in recent years, supply within the condo industry has caught up with demand, and sales have slowed. It is now in a slowdown phase.
  An alternative form of ownership, popular in parts of the U.S. but found also in other common law jurisdictions, is housing cooperative, also known as "company share" or "co-op". A Housing Cooperative is where the building has an associated legal company and ownership of shares gives the right to a lease for the residence of a unit. Another form is ground rent (solarium) in which a single landlord retains ownership of the land (solum) but leases the surface rights (superficies) which renew in perpetuity or over a very long term. This is comparable to a civil-law emphyteusis, except that emphyteusis shifts the duties of up-keep and making improvements onto the renter.
  In the U.S., there are several different styles of condominium complexes. For example, a garden condominium complex consists of low-rise buildings built with landscaped grounds surrounding them. A townhouse condominium complex consists of multi-floor semi-detached homes. In condominium townhouses, the purchaser owns only the interior, while the building itself is owned by a condominium corporation. The corporation is jointly owned by all the owners and charges them fees for general maintenance and major repairs. Freehold townhouses are exclusively owned, without any condominium aspects. In the U.S., this type of ownership is called fee simple.
  New York’s  Condominium Act was passed in 1964. The first condominium building was the St. Tropez Condominium in Manhattan built in 1965.
caption: The interior of a loft condominium in Chicago's west side, USA
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