Most areas of Almaty are a combination of large apartment buildings and single-family residences. Most people live in apartments, and now own that apartment.

Almaty has more single-family residences than most former-USSR cities, including Moscow, where almost everyone lives in an apartment building. Single-family dwellings were not favored, even for the more rural areas. The 1968 "Fundmentals of Land Law" of the USSR expressly encouraged gathering rural people into planned population centers.