Euphemisms Run Rampant : By Any Other Appellation, a Condo Is Still a Condo
A house may be a home, but a home may not be a house.
It may be a court, patio, garden or zero-lot line home.
It may be a junior executive studio, paired condominium, town house or villa.
Villa? Webster defines it as “a rural or suburban residence, especially a large and pretentious one.”
No wonder there is confusion when the word villa is used in an ad for one of 471 units in several three-story buildings in a sizable Southern California city.
Definition of Condominiums
In another project where the term villa is being used, even the marketing representative was perplexed. Asked if the villas are really condominiums, she replied, “I don’t know, but they have common walls.” Turns out that they were condominiums.
Nothing wrong now with the word condominium, but hungry developers, zealous advertising representatives and inventive publicity agents coined other euphemisms when the condo market went sour a few years ago.
The condominium has been with us for awhile, and most people know what it is: a unit in a multifamily dwelling that is owned and financed by its occupant, who also has an undivided interest in the common areas, facilities and underlying land. Condos are different from stock cooperatives in which residents own shares of stock in a corporation, which owns the building or buildings.
The definitions for “condominium” and “stock cooperative” are found in California law, but the meanings of other newer housing terms are not as easily traced.
Many--including ranchownership, condomaximums, seasononiums and condotels--seem to have originated in the developers’ marketing or advertising departments, although Timothy R. Binder, senior vice president-general counsel of Hotel del Coronado Corp. in charge of The Racquet Club in Palm Springs, says “condotel” has a legal meaning in the East.
‘Limits from a Tax Standpoint’
“There, a condotel is where the owners can only use their units a few days a year, and the profits (from renting the rooms in a hotel-like situation) are shared with a management company,” he said.
The Racquet Club is similar, because it has some units that are privately owned but are rented through the hotel, which takes a share of the rent. “The owners can use their units almost anytime they want, though there are some limits from a tax standpoint,” he explained.
Condominium sales, like the sale of nearly every other kind of real estate (no matter what it’s called), picked up with the drop in interest rates, but there are still many condominiums on the market in Palm Springs and other desert communities due to builder ambition and buyer apprehension, which has eased since Congress decided not to eliminate second-home tax deductions.
Builder ambition led to a glut of condos in numerous other places besides the desert, and for awhile, “condominium” and “condominium conversion” (conversion of an apartment to a condo) became bad words--almost as bad as Roger Reitzel’s definition of “condominium” in his humorous book, “Real Estate as a Second Language” (published in 1983 by Chicago Review Press and illustrated by David J. Schutten).
Reitzel wrote: “From the Latin word meaning ‘to share walls with those of lesser intelligence,’ it (a condominium) is a legal form of ownership of a unit located within a multiple-unit development. In residential condominiums, this involves taking a large, comfortable living area, dividing it up until each resulting space is too small for habitation and then selling these tiny spaces for an unconscionable profit.”
(“Condominium,” joint ownership, is actually derived from the Latin words con, meaning “with,” and dominium, meaning “ownership.”)
Reitzel didn’t include “resort time-sharing” in his glossary, but if he had, he certainly would have talked the same way about profit, because time-sharing takes the condo concept a step further. A time-share, also called a vacation license and resort ownership, is usually an interest in a condominium for a specified period of time each year. So a developer might sell the time-share interests in a unit to many buyers and make more than he would if he sold the unit as a condominium.
“Seasononium,” a time-share purchased for an entire season, got scanty use, as did “condomaximum,” which probably meant “big condominium,” and “ranchownership,” which was devised about a year ago to sell 1/2,500th interests in a 570-acre ranch near Hemet.
Next to “single-family home,” though, “condominium” probably enjoyed the widest use of any American housing term in the past 20 years. (It didn’t appear in California statutes before 1963.)
Reflecting the popularity of the condominium, Reitzel joked: “This word has had a strange evolution from a noun--’Hey, baby, how’s your condo?’ or ‘There’s no place like condo’--to an adverb--’My apartment just went condo’--to a verb--”Don’t condo me, man.’ ”
And even when condomania cooled off a few years ago, the concept continued, sometimes under different names.
Like “junior executive studio,” a euphemism for a tiny (500-square-foot) condo.
Or “patio homes,” which have patios; “court homes,” which have courts, and “garden homes,” which have--you guessed it.
And “vertical subdivision,” usually meaning--like all of the above--condominiums.
The “town house” is also used in advertising to embellish the word condo, although Webster defines “town house” as “the city residence of a person who also owns a country residence.” And Reitzel wrote that town houses are “tall, narrow residences that are built side by side so they won’t tip over.”
There is no universally accepted definition of a town house any more than there is for any other housing term, but to the building industry, the town house and the villa are both forms of condominiums. The difference: The town house has two stories, the villa has one.
Jay Shackford, staff vice president of the National Assn. of Home Builders, said that “town house” and other housing terms “grow out of tradition, something that the industry just accepts” and “aren’t necessarily legally defined.”
California Civil Code
A few are defined by law. Besides “condominium” and “stock cooperative,” Sec. 1351 of the California Civil Code defines “planned development” (often called a “planned unit development” by local jurisdictions) and “community apartment project” as types of “common-interest developments,” though the term “apartment” in California is commonly known as a rental unit.
“That about exhausts it (for state definitions),” Hugo Werner of the state Department of Real Estate said.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development embellishes some of these definitions to fit its needs. As Fred Stillions, a public affairs specialist with the department, explained:
“Our basic definition of condo, for example, is the same (as in California law), but we add to it minimum property standards, which must be satisfied before we can make a loan.”
Established New Zone
Unlike “condominium,” many terms are not legally defined, even though the types of housing they describe are government regulated.
Like “zero-lot line homes,” which in the city of Los Angeles may observe smaller front, side and rear yards than those required in the city’s other single-family zones.
In 1984, the City Council passed an ordinance establishing a new zone for single-family dwellings “observing zero-foot side yards on lots of a minimum size of 2,500 square feet and permitting 2,500-square-foot lots and zero-foot side yards for single-family developments in multiple residential zones.”
From this, it’s clear that “zero-lot line” does not mean what Reitzel says it means: “a very cold land parcel boundary.” But the term does not appear in the definition section of the city’s zoning code, which Glenn O. Johnson, principal planner with the city, conceded “hasn’t been updated in years.”
Term Was Disfavored
Years can make a big difference when it comes to housing jargon. Charles Abrams made a valiant effort in his 1971 “Language of Cities” (published by Viking Press) to define “some of the most relevant urban terms,” but he listed few housing terms used today and called a duplex “a suite in an apartment house that has rooms on two floors.”
The “duplex” was more commonly known for years as a single building with two homes joined by a common walls, but the term went into disfavor as builders started building “attached single-family homes,” which at first glance seem to be much like duplexes, unless they have three or more units in the same building and then, they seem to be like triplexes, fourplexes, fiveplexes, and so on.
A harder look reveals a difference in design. Reitzel calls the duplex “the building industry’s answer to Siamese twins.” More attention is being given in the design of attached single-family homes to privacy and individuality.
The critical difference is not design, however. It is the selling procedure. The duplex, triplex or fourplex was usually sold to a buyer, who then rented out all or all but one of the units, which became the buyer’s home.
Housing Costs Escalated
By contrast, each unit in the attached single-family building is sold, generally to a buyer who then lives there. In most cases, the land under each attached single-family home is included in the sale.
The single-family attached home was conceived as housing costs escalated. As Jim Frampton, a San Diego public relations consultant, put it: “Builders looked for different ways to give people what they wanted, while cutting expenses.”
What people want most, studies have shown, is the so-called “single-family home,” which is, of course, housing jargon itself for a separate structure occupied by one family. (It’s not, as Reitzel defines it: “a home that contains only unmarried people.”)
One of the first single-family attached home types was built by Pardee Construction in Las Vegas in the late ‘70s, Frampton said, but those units were called condominiums. Pacific Scene initiated the idea in San Diego, he added, and those units were actually called “single-family attached homes.”
Allowed Smaller Lots
That was in 1982. Until then, he said, there were local ordinances in the city prohibiting construction of a single-family residence on any lot smaller than 5,000 square feet. The laws were changed to allow single-family construction on smaller lots, and then the attached units could be built, he explained.
It didn’t take long then for the “paired condo” to come on the market, and then Dennis Devine, son of the late actor Andy Devine, went even further in the San Fernando Valley by building “detached condos.” Another Southern California builder followed, building “single-family condos,” which were essentially the same thing: units that were detached and had front-yard landscaping and other community amenities. The word “condo” is coming back.
This has led, however, to the promotion of the “detached single-family house,” which is something like the expressions “formal dining room” and “night-lighted tennis courts.” They are redundant and ridiculous, but that’s another story.
