Housing estates

A housing estate (or sometimes housing complex) is a group of homes and other buildings built together as a single development. The exact form may vary from country to country. Accordingly, a housing estate is usually built by a single contractor, with only a few styles of house or building design, so they tend to be uniform in appearance. In the British Isles, the term is quite broad, and can include anything from high rise government-subsidised housing, right through to more upmarket, developer-led suburban tract housing.

In Asian cities such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Seoul, an estate may range from detached houses to high density tower blocks with or without commercial facilities; in Europe and America, these may take the form of town housing, or the older-style rows of terraced houses associated with the industrial revolution, detached or semi-detached houses with small plots of land around them forming gardens, and are frequently without commercial facilities.

Housing estates are the usual form of residential design used in new towns, where estates are designed as an autonomous suburb, centred on a small commercial centre. Such estates are usually designed to minimise through-traffic flows, and to provide recreational space in the form of parks and greens.

The use of the term may have arisen from an area of housing being built on what had been a country estate as towns and cities expanded in and after the 19th century. It was in use by 1901. Reduction of the phrase to mere "estate" is common in the United Kingdom and Ireland (especially when preceded by the specific estate name), but not in the United States.

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