# A home not a unit

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly), 2023-01-11

apartment-bias, dwelling-unit, home, housing, real-estate-vocabulary, residential-unit, toronto

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I dislike the term residential _unit_.

It makes a home sound like some sort of widget. When have you ever heard someone say, "unit sweet unit"? Never. And yet this is generally [what we use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_unit) to refer to housing that comes in an apartment form and is not grade-related.

If you build low-rise houses, you're a _home_ builder. But anything beyond that, and the home moniker apparently needs to fall away.

There is, of course, a very good reason for this and it is that we have a [longstanding history of not liking apartments](https://brandondonnelly.com/2022/05/19/disease-breeding-tenements/). And so this is in all likelihood some sort of carryover of that bias. Surely there's no way to create a morally-correct _home_ in an apartment. So let's use a more utilitarian sounding name, like _unit_.

I'm sure that I have used the word "unit" countless times on this blog throughout the years. But I am working to remove it from my vocabulary. And now you can all hold me accountable to that.

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly/a-home-not-a-unit)*