House

A house is a building where people live. Most houses have walls, a roof, a floor, doors, and windows. Inside, there are usually rooms for sleeping, eating, cooking, and washing. People all over the world build houses, but the way they look depends on the weather, the land, and the materials nearby.

Houses come in many shapes. A small one-room cabin is a house. So is a tall apartment building with many families inside. Some houses sit on the ground. Others sit on tall wooden poles called stilts, which lift them above floods or muddy soil. Some houses float on water, like the houseboats on rivers in Vietnam and the Netherlands.

The materials people use depend on what is around them. In forests, people build with wood. In hot, dry places, people build thick walls of mud and clay that stay cool inside. The Pueblo people in the American Southwest have built homes from adobe, a mix of clay and straw, for hundreds of years. In the Arctic, the Inuit once built winter shelters called igloos out of blocks of hard snow. The snow trapped warm air inside.

Some traditional houses are made to be moved. The Mongolian ger, sometimes called a yurt, is a round tent of felt and wood. Families take it apart, pack it onto animals, and set it up again at the next campsite. A whole ger can be moved in less than an hour.

Cities changed houses in a big way. When millions of people moved into cities in the eighteen hundreds, there was not enough land for everyone to have a yard. So builders started stacking homes on top of each other. Today, most people in cities live in apartments. The world's tallest apartment building, in New York City, is more than 1,400 feet high, taller than the Empire State Building.

A house is not the same thing as a home. A house is the building. A home is the feeling of belonging that people make inside it, with their family, their food, their smells, and their stories. A grand mansion can feel cold, and a tiny cabin can feel warm. People often say "home" when they mean the place where they feel safe.

Around the world, more than a billion people do not have safe housing. Groups like Habitat for Humanity work to build affordable houses for families who need them.