> which in turn causes the weird housing distribution of North American cities.
This is a hilarious misunderstanding of the complex intersection of class divides, race divides, gerrymandering, history (white flight), nimbyism, and for-profit zoning that has led to the current lack of mid-rise affordable housing.
Is there any empirical data on the safety benefits of a second stairwell?
That being said - when in doubt, I favor more regulation for safety, not less.
Table 1.2 shows a breakdown of fire deaths per 100 fires. US 0.3 France, Germany 0.1 Greece, UK, Belgium 0.2 Poland, Denmark, Slovakia 0.4
So it's a bit of a mixed bag. The reported average was 0.5 (report didn't cover every country). Sadly Canada wasn't in the table.
Japan at 3.8 was a bit of a surprise.
1. https://ctif.org/world-fire-statistics 2. https://ctif.org/sites/default/files/2022-08/CTIF_Report27_E...
Death and injury frequencies. Anecdotes of preventable deaths, e.g. where one stairwell was not enough versus where a corridor separating two stairwells became, itself, an obstacle. Drill simulations.
We should have have some basis for the rule. (If we don't, I'd support scrapping it.)
Is it truly unreasonable to want to move away from places where crime is rising and cleanliness and living standards are falling? Isn't it a bit unfair to ascribe that desire to the level of whiteness of a person?
I do believe there are city people and rural people. Each has a right to choose for themselves. Forcing unwanted change on either group is wrong. Towns and cities should chart their own courses.
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/residential-fires/
https://www.europeanfiresafetyalliance.org/our-focus/statist...
False - and it's not even close. Europe has almost a full order of magnitude more death from residential fires than the US - house fires caused 2,620 deaths over 5 years in the US [0] vs ~5000/yr in Europe [1].
[0] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/house-fire-stati... [1] https://www.europeanfiresafetyalliance.org/our-focus/statist...
Your source says that was 2,620 per year further down in the article:
>House fires cause an average of 2,620 civilian deaths each year.
Given that the EU has a significantly higher population than the US (~500 million, the EU data may or may not have included the UK, vs ~330 million) the per capita statistics end up fairly close.
That's a rather sweeping statement.
> and for-profit zoning that has led to the current lack of mid-rise affordable housing.
Yes, it's a complicated issue with tons of causes, but what this site is saying is that the requirement for a second stairwell skews the economy of building mid-rises so much that they become unfeasible for developers (In Ontario) even if all the other factors were to be fixed. And so you're stuck with either high-rises or single-story buildings.
Well, there are alternative ways to reduce the risks presented by a fire in the primary staircase trapping people inside.
For example, good sprinkler coverage of the primary staircase, strict rules prohibiting storing anything flammable below the staircase or running electrical wiring there, compartmentation so there's time for the fire brigade to arrive before a fire can spread between homes, housing options for vulnerable citizens so only able-bodied people have to evacuate via the stairs, and so on.
Of course, many American buildings are made of wood, so it's understandable why American fire codes look different to European ones - and if I had to be in a burning building but could choose the design, an American-style single storey suburban home where every room has a window you can climb out of at ground floor level is hard to beat!
Every single apartment I've lived in in Stockholm has had a single stairwell, and it's not something I've ever thought about because no-one thinks of it as an issue. But on the other hand, those stairwells are always concrete and stone and marble, and fire regulations forbid you from storing anything in the stairwells or outside your apartment.
Take my current Stockholm apartment, there's a four-storey drop from the balcony to the ground and a single stairwell, which would apparently horrify every North American.
But the walls are concrete. The walls between apartments are concrete or drywall. There's four apartments per landing. The apartment doors are made of steel. And the stairwell is empty and marbled, so there's nothing that can burn in the stairwell, and it's very difficult for fire to spread from one apartment to the others. There's no sprinkler system, but I think there's a fire extinguisher on each landing.
Not a problem.
I’m pretty sure sprinklers have been shown to massively increase fire safety.
The point is that this can't happen for a number of reasons. The landings in my building are quite small, four doors and a stairwell, it's literally two meters from my apartment door to the stairwell, there are no long corridors. And there's nothing that can burn in the stairwell, it's all concrete and stone and steel. And all the apartment doors are steel as well.
The dangers of apartment fires are mitigated differently, so that there is no need for a second stairwell or fire escape.
And this is something I didn't see on the site, and which is probably where they're a bit wrong and misguided. Just because actual fire statistics are better in Europe than in North America despite allowing single stairwells, it doesn't mean you can remove the requirement from the Ontario building code and everything will be fine and dandy. You have to add all the other things that mitigate fire hazards.
Try your Stockholm apartment in that.
The US can obviously build earthquake-proof concrete and steel skyscrapers, just look at the entire SF downtown. So if you can do that, why wouldn't you be able to build earthquake-proof midrise buildings out of concrete and steel?
When I lived in SF I was woken one night by an earthquake, the entire 42-story high-rise I was living in was swaying back and forth, but obviously didn't collapse.
Sure, I can see how a wooden construction is a cheaper way to make buildings earthquake-proof, but does it really cost that much to earthquake-proof a mid-rise? Or is it not economically feasible to build mid-rises out of anything but wood in the first place?
I live in a row-style apartment building in NYC built within the last decade, which is 6 floors, 2 apartments per floor, steel frame with concrete floors. There is a single interior stairwell, also all cinderblock. We have restrictions on what can be stored in common space.
NYC categorizes this type of construction as "fireproof" - which basically means that in case of fire, unless the fire is in your unit, it is expected to be safer for you to remain in your apartment and await evacuation than to enter smoke-filled hallways. Any fire is expected to be contained.
The city's other category of dwelling is "non-fireproof", and non-fireproof buildings require multiple forms of egress. You need multiple ways out because the fire is expected to spread.
Cool!
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and since the site is specifically about the building codes of Ontario, arguing for adapting a building code similar to the one you describe for NYC is probably a much better way of making your case, rather than posting a bunch of artsy floorplans from recent projects in various European cities...
NIMBYism, and the cultural obsession with low-density, single-family homes only made possible by car-centric transportation infrastructure is.
Which is also in no small part caused by a financial and tenant rights system that pushes people towards home ownership, instead of renting.
European buildings are also less likely to be made out of wood, which is good if you care about fire safety that much.
No, it's not. Cheap gas[0], giant freaking interstates, and public transit systems (when they are even present) that are very clearly built for the 'poors' are.
Another 3% to the per-square-foot-cost of building a multi-tenant building aren't the reason that Houston has 12 and 16-lane highways cutting right through the city, or why it takes an hour to travel by bus in Stockton a distance that you could travel in 10 minutes by car.
Fitting fire trucks is a problem for local, last-mile streets[1], not arterials, and availability of arterials (and lack of availability of alternatives) are what plays a large part in how people get around.
[0] Under $3.20/gallon in most of the country, compared to over $7/gallon in most of Europe. Not to mention the double-whammy of generally lower[2] European wages.
[1] Most American suburbs solve the width-of-last-mile-street problem by simply... Not having sidewalks. It's not like there's anywhere you can walk to from them...
[2] Okay, okay, yes, Western European take-home incomes for low-paying jobs tend to be higher than their American counterparts.
> and public transit systems (when they are even present) that are very clearly built for the 'poors'
This one's funny because it's true, but the way you write it makes it sound disparaging - whereas if you said they were designed for "equity" then everyone would agree that's what it's for and that it's good.
Another way to say it is, American transit planners will happily make a project worse and take longer to build, as long as it reaches poorer communities first.
For smaller-footprint (multiple buildings per city block), stairwells in opposite corners seems to be the most common pattern. About six to ten units per floor in a rectangle.
No.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois_Theatre_fire
Or more recent and relevant, an apartment fire: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Bronx_apartment_fire