CHAPTER 1The Shared-Space ConceWhat Do You Get ForYour Money?pt:Shared-space housing is not new. Prehistoric cave communities may havebeen the world's first cooperative apartments, and the ever-efficient Romans,from whom we get the word condominium, even recorded the deeds of theirmultiunit dwellings. Most were rentals or slave quarters, but surviving rec-ords show that in some buildings the apartments were owned by individuals;and the courtyards, the passageways, and yes, the baths, were owned col-lectively and shared. Later the shared-space concept became a part of life throughout medie-val Europe. Walled cities could not expand outward upon the surroundingland without inviting attack from roving bands of robbers, and thereforegrew upward. People, being what they were and are, claimed ownership towhole stories or sections of these early high-rises. Some of their legal codesand entanglements survive even to this day. On this continent, a prime ex-ample of ancient shared-space housing survives in the great and beautifulcommunities of the Pueblo people. Today--in the late-twentieth-century world of titles, deeds, mortgages(and creative mortgages), vacillating interest rates, leases, municipal taxes,computerized house-hunting, liens, encroachments, suits, depreciationallowances, necessary open space and recreational facilities, air space, main-tenance assessments, rent control, Internal Revenue codes, "baby boom"demographics, recurrent recessions, state legislators who would make theproverbial jack-of-all-trades look like a specialist, and more legal paperwork