Homes typically provide areas and facilities for sleeping, preparing food, eating and hygiene. Larger groups may live in a nursing home, children's home, convent or any similar institution. A homestead also includes agricultural land and facilities for domesticated animals. Where more secure dwellings are not available, people may live in the informal and sometimes illegal shacks found in slums and shanty towns. More generally, "home" may be considered to be a geographic area, such as a town, village, suburb, city, or country.

​

Transitory accommodation in a treatment facility for a few weeks is not normally considered permanent enough to replace a more stable location as 'home'.[citation needed] In 2005, 100 million people worldwide were estimated to be homeless.

​

A house is a building that functions as a home for humans  ranging from simple dwellings such as rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to complex, fixed structures of wood, brick, or other materials containing plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems. Most conventional modern houses will at least contain a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as chickens or larger livestock (like cattle) may share part of the house with humans. The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, although households may also be other social groups or individuals. The design and structure of homes is also subject to change as a consequence of globalisation, urbanisation and other social, economic, demographic, and technological reasons. Various other cultural factors also influence the building style and patterns of domestic space.

​

A terraced house is a style of medium-density housing where a row of identical or mirror-image houses share side walls, while semi-detached housing consists of pairs of houses built side-by-side or (less commonly) back-to-back, sharing a party wall and with mirrored layouts.

​

An apartment (in American English) or a flat (in British English) is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies only part of a building. Such a building may be called an apartment building, apartment house (in American English), block of flats, tower block, high-rise or, occasionally mansion block (in British English), especially if it consists of many apartments for rent. In Scotland it is called a block of flats or if it's a traditional sandstone building a tenement, which has a pejorative connotation elsewhere. Apartments may be owned by an owner/occupier by leasehold tenure or rented by tenants (two types of housing tenure).

​

A homestead consists of a dwelling, often a farm house, together with other buildings and associated land, and facilities for domesticated animals.