Units

When did apartments become units?  You hear it all the time, from public housing, to condos, to large high end multi-family buildings.  At some point, "unit" replaced "apartment".  Now, admittedly, apartment is not personal enough, either.  Not like house, definitely not like home, and not even like multi-family building. Yet all of those convey, to some degree, the idea that people live there.  Unit removes all human connotation.  I don’t know if it started to make developers sound more important, or just to remove the human component from the business aspect of rental housing.  But when you think about all the history, all the families, all the lives lived in an apartment through the years, "unit" just doesn’t do it justice.

Might as well be storage units.