The case for single-stair multifamily
thesisdriven.com
thesisdriven.com
Burdensome regulations on housing construction have caused costs to skyrocket. Minimum lot sizes, setback requirements, square footage minimums, floor-area ratio restrictions, overzealous height restrictions, parking requirements, abuse of environmental reviews, historic designations, community reviews, overzealous MFH requirements (like double-stair), below-market mandates, all have worked together to constrain supply, leading to skyrocketing costs.
It's the single most important economic issue for me. We need a nationwide effort to ease these restrictions, or we're just going to continue to see rents eat up more and more of young people's earnings.
I quibble. Mentioned double stair
I thought of Grenfell Tower block
That was catastrophic partly because the one stairwell filled with smoke
Making housing cheaper also means making higher quality housing cheaper.
Or, much more likely, builder profits higher.
That's possible, but, considering that all the most expensive places in this country were developed in the very way this article is advocating, I'm going to label it as improbable.
Many amongst my friends and family think I'm a bit crazy living in the inner city, but the truth is my equity has skyrocketed, and will continue to do so. Urban dwellings are in high demand. Given that many of these same urban dwellings are illegal to construct now / prohibitively expensive, we've handicapped the ability of the market to meet demand.
It is often more the case that limited supply is an unintended outcome. People just don’t think ahead.
I have been to many city council meetings. Stymieing population growth is an explicit goal. The speakers tend to perceive harms from more people as opposed to pure misanthropes.
e.g. "More people creates more traffic so we should prevent housing to prevent people"
Although, I cannot see their true intents. It is possible the speakers do dislike people, which is not politically popular. Expressing their desire requires making up other tangential causes. Hidden agendas creates engineering confusion. If the goal was truly to manage traffic, an engineer would suggest better bus routes.
Also to enrich union tradespeople. See prohibitions against PEX plumbing and requirements for electrical conduit instead of Romex.
If you time your upgrade to the fire engines with when you naturally would want to renew them anyway, then it doesn't really cost much extra.
If they have 1000 units that they say are worth $1 million each, they can borrow from banks as if they are sitting on $1 billion of assets.
If they sell one of those units at $500K, they now look like they have $500 million, which not only impedes their future borrowing but can trigger obligations to their current lenders.
I’m in favor of greater freedoms, and the freedom to choose a single stair MFH if I want.
But I don’t want.
Same reason I'm extremely skeptical that our fire trucks need to be so grotesquely large, despite what the fire departments claim. If there were no countries with a good fire safety record outside North America, like sure, okay, maybe. But they're just as good or better at fighting fires in Europe, and manage to go this with human sized trucks that don't require extremely wide streets, wide turn radiuses, and aren't nearly as deadly for pedestrians as a result. Thanks for existing, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan etc! One day we'll accept that you to cities, building and engineering better and just copy you.
Not everyone is young and in shape to push couches or jump over them.
I suppose you also think it’s silly for flight crew to confirm people sitting in the exit row are able and willing to help in an emergency.
Couldn’t you just push them out of the way or jump over them?
You’re 85.
That is an extremely specific situation!
> How is double stair MFH overzealous?
There is a cost to every regulation. The cost to this one is that housing is more expensive for all Americans. Stress, poverty, and homelessness all lead to negative health outcomes. Taken as a whole, those negative outcomes may very well outweigh the fire safety benefits of double-stair (which have never been proven to exist).
> I’m in favor of greater freedoms, and the freedom to choose a single stair MFH if I want. > But I don’t want.
Right, so it sounds like you are in favor of removing the double-stair regulation?
It’s an example. Can you generalize it or should I?
I suggest reading the article, which is intended to answer this question in depth. It provides concrete examples!
The elderly and disabled will also need to get furniture up stairs. Not to mention that the housing shortage forces more people to share a house with strangers.
Or, you could just build more housing... And stop insisting on so much living space while you're at it. Here in Tokyo, no one lives with strangers, even if they get minimum wage. They can still afford an apartment by themselves, though it'll be a very small apartment that's certainly illegal to build in America.
How much have costs increased, and what tells us that it's regulations, not many other causes?
Also, which regulations? Some are more valuable, some less, and inevitably some will misfire. I'm not just going to trust real estate developers, who have their own interests, to meet other needs.
> below-market mandates
I'm not sure we need more high-end development - those tenants have plenty of options.
> community reviews
In cities, new buildings can impact a community for a century. They should have a say, not just a developer from another city.
The entire article is on the prohibition of single stair multi-family residential.
> I'm not sure we need more high-end development - those tenants have plenty of options.
This is silly. When car makers couldn't make enough cars in 2021 and the price went up, was the solution to ban making new cars? Should we have prohibited making cars with fancy trim? Having enough housing for everyone is the only way to make sure affordable housing exists.
Building more expensive homes doesn't seem to increase availability of affordable ones. The idea that it would seems to be another 'trickle-down economics' theory, the one from the 1980s that if we help the wealthy get wealthier, the benefits will 'trickle-down' (turns out, only the first step worked). Reasonably, wealthy people don't see poor housing as an option, though there is gentrification.
> When car makers couldn't make enough cars in 2021 and the price went up, was the solution to ban making new cars? Should we have prohibited making cars with fancy trim?
Making expensive cars wouldn't seem to result in many more affordable ones.
> This is silly.
An aggressive assertion that you aren't thinking, and aren't willing to.
> I'm not sure we need more high-end development - those tenants have plenty of options.
Evidence is strong that market-rate construction causes richer residents to exchange their current unit for a higher-end unit, opening up supply at the lower end. [3]
The problem with BMR requirements is the increased costs borne by developers, who have to offset those increased costs by charging more for the market rate units. There's a limit to that market, so fewer units are constructed than otherwise would be. Middle class families are especially worse off, as they neither qualify for BMR lotteries, nor earn enough for the rapidly accelerating market-rate unit. [4]
Further, rents are lower in states that disallow BMR mandates (like Texas) than those that have BMR mandates (like California).
1. https://www.axios.com/2019/08/28/study-californias-land-use-... 2. https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/05/business/single-family-zoning... 3. https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-... 4. https://escholarship.org/content/qt036599mr/qt036599mr_noSpl...
In my country the simple and cheap four-story walk-up condo building (with a single stair and no elevator) is the bread and butter medium density housing for the working class. You either have two or four units per floor, all opening to the stairwell with almost no space lost in corridors, it is simple and efficient. Alternatively for higher density there are higher versions with typically up to 12 floors with one or two elevators but still only one stairwell, so keeping the same efficiency.
Fire in the only stairwell or a collapse, guess you just die or hope the fire department saves you before you suffocate.
You can stick build residential buildings up to five stories and it’s way, way cheaper than reinforced concrete and steel. They are mega complexes because the financial stakeholders want to maximize the available land and rents.
Part of the author’s point is that single-stair buildings can be built economically on much smaller pieces of land. This increases the number of plots — especially in urban environments — on which you can build MFH, plots which developers today wouldn’t even think of.
Legalizing single-stair buildings would not really change the viability of big apartment complexes, you’re right. But it would allow for smaller ones.
Yes it is money. More staircases remarkably increase the costs of buildings. Single stairway, cheaper buildings, more profitable to do other sorts of buildings, more variety of buildings etc.
(see also no parking mandates)
But there's a usually-worse cost to the second set of stairs, that I'll call "geometry". A second set of stairs is not a giant support column, which you can wall off and ignore. The halls, doors, and such that it requires also suck up space, and impose many more restrictions on the layout of the actual living spaces for human beings - which are the sole reason for the building to exist.
Whenever I see this proposed my brain immediately goes to the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK. I guess that may just be an outlier due to the myriad of other causes, but it gives me pause.
Fire compromising the structure of a building, or the structure itself burning is almost never the cause of death or injury. The primary killer in structure fires is hydrogen cyanide gas. Wood does emit hydrogen cyanide but the primary source is synthetic materials like upholstered furniture, wall and floor coverings, cabinetry, and other personal belongings.
If you have two houses, one made of gypsum-covered 2x4 walls and the other made of stone and steel and a faulty space heater ignites a sofa or some polyester curtains, the buildings are equally lethal. The hydrogen cyanide will have killed you long before the fire burned through the drywall. Non-flammable walls don't even necessarily slow a fire's spread if synthetic materials are involved. The high heat of by their combustion and their dirty combustion causes flashover which ignites all flammable materials in a given space.
I have been a volunteer firefighter for almost 20 years. I have experienced too many fatalities but none of them have ever burned to death. All victims have been dead due to asphyxiation (CO/CO2) or cyanide poisoning.
The differences in death rates aren't as stark as the author contends (for example 0.2 deaths per fire in Great Britain, 0.3 in the US) and my gut tells me the main differentiation between the US and European deaths is the smaller, more compartmentalized nature of European dwellings (which limits the spread of smoke) coupled with their greater level of urbanization which leads to faster emergency services response (the faster a fire is knocked down the less gas it produces).
Open floorplans kill.
All of that being said, wooden construction does cause more firefighter deaths-- especially if engineered wood is used. But by the time the floor of a house has been weakened enough by a basement fire to fail and kill a firefighter, all of the occupants are already dead.
The way I have seen the idea of single-stair multifamily proposed in US was that in areas where zoning requires sprinklers in multifamily dwellings anyway, all the extra hallway space required for the second stairway is an unnecessary burden cost wise for little marginal safety.
A common type of fire that has emerged recently is lithium ion battery fires. Some jurisdictions have so many it is an epidemic.
Sprinklers do nothing to combat lithium iron battery fires, other than slowing the growth of secondary fires.
Honestly I don't think secondary exits should be required for small, low-occupancy buildings (that's a problem we solved with fire escapes but they're "ugly") but at the same time I don't think eliminating them would solve any accommodation availability problems.
For example, in the floor plan included in the article, eliminating the secondary egress staircase would add less than 140 square feet (varies by jurisdiction/occupancy but that floor plan looks like 48" wide stairs with 8 12" treads and a 48"*96" landing on each end) to the floor. In the article itself the author (rightly) asserts that adding a single bedroom to the design in a size acceptable to the market requires approximately 180 additional square feet.
So all you'd get are bigger bedrooms and/or closets, or the addition of a single tiny bedroom. Indeed, in the example given in the article it would be almost impossible to add an additional bedroom. But one or both of the apartments could be given palatial bathrooms...
Not to mention european houses also have drywall over the concrete these days, the days of barren concrete or plaster over concrete have been over since at least the 90s.
In principle, each apartment in Grenfell should have been able to burn out completely while the neighbouring units were untouched, so there was no need for a second stair as any evacuation would have been limited to units adjacent rather than the entire population.
What actually happened is that years of neglect had seen firebreaks and bulkheads repeatedly compromised and then a load of flammable cladding added to the outside, because the building industry is basically rotten.
Had the same incident taken place when the building was first constructed, the damage would have been limited to the one apartment.
Big business gets a lot of flak, but they are honestly better on average than small businesses and many local governments institutions.
The crux appears to be adequate resources to enforce standards
> a commercial reputation to defend (and deep pockets to go after in a law suit).
Meanwhile, in "the real world" sufficiently large businesses are routinely silo'd into seperate sub companies and those that are associated with disaster, product liability, deaths, etc are often mysteriously bankrupt or with insufficient funds to meet penalties of pennies on the dollar.
Happens in this thread and whenever it is brought up in social media. The original article talks about statistics, various extra measures to ensure safety and limiting to buildings 6 stores or less.
But US commentators have trouble getting past their initial reaction. They also do the usual US thing of discounting anything from overseas as "not applicable to US conditions".
There's an assumption here that the code was put in place to save lives. There's a whole lot of regulation that exists simply to make it difficult to build. Lots of people profit when housing is scarce (or unavailable to certain demographics), and want to keep it that way.
It is always worth asking what the point of a regulation is, and whether it accomplishes the thing it claims to be trying to accomplish.
The answer I've heard that makes sense, is that if you do this in US buildings you need decent fire suppression systems even if those bump the price.
But it's well worth doing in terms of making more types of nice buildings viable.
Either build in the traditional American style out of wood, or (new option) build out of stone and add a robust fire suppression system, but in return we let you get away with a single staircase and other features that increase density.
One notable requirement of single-stair buildings where they are legal in the US, is that
1. the height is generally determined by the height of the fire ladders available, providing a second means of egress
2. the single stair requirement usually only applies to buildings that have a low maximum units per floor. In Seattle where they are legal, this is four units. At four units a floor, your front door directly opens feet away from the stairwell, and having a second staircase a sufficient distance away would be hard to fit in the floor plan.
This is an interesting requirement and makes me wonder if some of the need for two staircases comes from the proximity - or lack thereof - to fire services. I'd be sitting in a burning home for a long time if I had to wait for a fire ladder.
The American city topology is basically office towers surrounded by single family homes; in the midcentury we demolished a lot of the in-between building stock, which is now referred to by urbanists as the "missing middle". Compare this to Europe or Japan which is largely buildings in between those sizes.
My current tower rig is 85’, our next will be 105.
Consider that is ladder length and the “true” height is really a hypotenuse on a right triangle with one side the building.
We can generally reach most of our properties just fine, as our tallest is about 5 stories. However there are some across a river with access harder in front, and a ladder across the river is the way to go.
This is something a lot of people get confused about^. To summarize, each ton of wood used in constructions takes approx 1 ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere (cellulose is basically solidified carbon and oxygen), whereas each ton of concrete used in construction puts approx 100kg of C02 into the atmosphere.
^ "You're cutting down treeees, oh the humanity!"
The folks managing these forests are in the business of selling as much solidified CO2 as possible every single year, if there was a better way to do it I'm sure they would.
So if we really care about fire safety, shouldn't we be regulating more effective mitigations to protect these wooden buildings, rather than the two stair aspect?
Pointing out that there's a bigger risk factor than single stair has a natural conclusion.
However, I have become so jaded that I no longer believe that people advocating for two stair cases actually care about fire safety, because of their lack of concern about wooden structure risks.
Imposing strict, burdensome, and hardly-useful restrictions on multi-unit housing while ignoring life saving regulations for single unit housing has pretty clear ideological motivations.
Another concern is building stability, whether or not the actual construction process followed code, whether or not structural maintenance is adequate, & the age of some high rises. Florida recently had a condo collapse. There are many old tall buildings built on shifting water permeable ground in the US.
China has issues with tall buildings as well, particularly in it's river flood plains. It is quite surreal to see an entire high-rise being carried down a river. Look it up.
Edit:
I was unable to find the video with today's search...so here is the video. Apparently there was censorship with the Chinese government over the video.
Basically through an analysis of fire loss history combined with open property data. The fire engineering field hasn't traditionally had access to great data, for a few different reasons, but now the data is actually potentially available to answer the question – but it does need a bit of time and investment.
(I'm the author of the article.)
I don't really see how wood is more sustainable than eg brick or even steel and glass?
> Whenever I see this proposed my brain immediately goes to the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK. I guess that may just be an outlier due to the myriad of other causes, but it gives me pause.
You should look at statistics instead of single lurid anecdata. In any case, Grenfell Tower is a nice illustration of how when government provides services like housing, they don't magically provide safety. (Funnily enough, people usually try to spin that tower fire as some failure of the market, when the estate was managed by the local council.)
> I know the article makes the point that fire deaths per capita are lower in Europe, which lacks the requirement, but it also notes that US housing stock is also much more wooden and therefore at higher risk to begin with.
Btw, this might suggest to change the regulation so that you can either follow the existing US regulations when building with wood; or you get allowed more density and single-stairs etc, when building with whatever they use in Europe.
So highly sustainable from a global warming perspective at least.
You are right that wood captures carbon. But you have to think about the opportunity costs: the same land that you use to slowly grow your wood could be used to eg run wind turbines or solar panels to replace fossil fuels. (You could also stick a nuclear power plant on that land to replace even more fossil fuels. But on the margin, nuclear isn't really limited by the available land but by red tape and permissions. So adding a bit more land won't make the nuclear industry produce more energy.)
You'd have to run the numbers, it's not obvious to me which effect dominates. Probably also depends on how well wood grows in your climate, and how sunny and windy it is. And what else you could grow on that land.
Speculation: I suspect that emissions during construction will be relatively small fry, compared to the impact of density. Eg re-inforced concrete allows denser living (by building taller than wood, and by allowing single-stairs to be still firesafe, etc), and density tends to lower per capita CO2.
Of course, rural settings won't make use of the possibility of density. So for them it's just about the first order effects.
Perhaps this is a perspective thing?
Take one state in the western US that happens to have farmed timber, PV, and turbines: Oregon. Slightly larger than the United Kingdom, 6% of the population. There's not even a tiny amount of opportunity cost being lost by farming timber.
Older buildings only.
Nothing quite like hanging out on a fire escape on a hot humid summer night with a cold beer and charming company.
Along with the contortions involved climbing through the window in both directions...
Growing up I mostly lived in single family homes, but in college my dad moved into a townhouse and I lived with him for a couple years.
Before moving to France, my wife and I lived in single family homes and a '5-over-1' apartment.
Now, we live on the 7th floor, end-unit of an apartment building. It's a 'single-stair multifamily,' 'floor-through' apartment (thankfully with an elevator). Meaning our apartment a large balcony one one side and windows on three sides. The only side without a window leads to the stairwell. Every room has a window, even the bathroom and toilet (often separated in France).
Without a doubt, this place is one of the best types of housing I've ever occupied. In the summer we can open up windows on either side of the apartment and get a fantastic breeze. The concrete structure does a great job regulating the temperature for most of the year. We get sunlight in the morning and evening.
I hate yardwork and there's none to do. No sidewalks to shovel snow from either. I also experience neighborliness on par with most single family homes. Very similar to my dad's townhouse actually (probably not by coincidence if you think about the incentive structures).
We have a 5 year old son and we don't miss having a yard. There are parks nearby with playgrounds and paths where he can safely ride his bike without worrying about any cars.
Admittedly, I do miss having barbecues in the backyard. I also miss having a garage to use as a workshop.
The 5-over-1, on the other hand, was easily the worst type of housing I've occupied. Poor lighting, anonymous, ugly corridors. No sense of neighborliness. Poorly maintained and constructed. Nowhere near a good park without walking along a nasty arterial surface street.
I frequently ask myself, 'why can't we have this in the States?!' and now I know why. Building codes, zoning and city planners strike again.
We have an access road behind the building that is between the building and the green space. This access road is gated and is used by all of us residents (especially the kids).
The green space has plenty of things to share (garden areas, berries, fruit trees, barbecues, tables, chairs, etc...) My 5 year old son has a lot of friends who live in our area and he's able to just be himself running around, climbing trees, digging in dirt, and exploring his world within a safe community.
The density and use of space is much more efficient than what I was previously used to in the Pacific Northwest. During the last five years of living in Oslo, we have only needed a car when visiting friends at their cabins. I feel privileged to live a car free lifestyle.
This is something that Singapore seems to do quite well. Many blocks of flats have shared outdoor facilities like a bbq, childrens playground, pool, etc. I've never lived there but have friends who do and when I visit we'll have a bbq.
I live in the UK. The housing here is notoriously poor quality, even (or sometimes especially) new build blocks of flats. And even in the expensive places I'm not sure they offer this.
* https://morehousing.substack.com/p/bc-single-stair
* https://morehousing.substack.com/p/single-stair
See also:
> Number of storeys permissible with single exit stair around the world.
* https://www.coolearth.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/image-1....
* https://www.coolearth.ca/2022/03/16/building-code-change-to-...
The diagram illustrates that the longest aerial ladder firetruck available in North America is 137' / 41m, which should be able to reach about fourteen storeys high. A 'typical' aerial ladder is about 75' / 22m, which is about seven storeys.
A building that is seven stories high is going to be big enough to have multiple stairways; probably multiple elevators.
London has many high-rise buildings, but the many narrow roads and tight corners mean they don't operate the tallest fire trucks.
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnC9ge6WQAAFd7p?format=png&name=...
Seems like at no point along the way, as more and more fire safety measures were being added (eg. sprinklers!) did anyone think that maybe it meant some of the more egregiously expensive safety measures were now deprecated and their use should be ended.
British Columbia's government has mentioned they're looking into this and I hope we see an end to the mandated two staircases. People consistently say they want more two and three bedroom apartments. Single stairway buildings seem like one of the best ways to introduce the flexibility that would make those products more viable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM
which mentions this very pertinent section of the US National Housing Association Proceedings (1913), p.212:
"Do everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two-family dwellings, because the two-family house is the next least objectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind... if we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even where there are only three families; if we require fire escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds (compared to zoning regulations based on race), because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power[...] In our laws let most of the fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever"
"Almost every country in Western Europe—where single-stair apartment buildings can rise many times the IBC’s three-story height limit—has fewer fire deaths per capita than the US."
There is no analysis of where these fire deaths are occurring: are they in single-family homes? Commercial buildings? Car wrecks that caught on fire? Trailer parks? More compelling would be to compare apartment deaths in other countries with those in the US or, at a minimum, explain why the available statistics advance this thesis even if they are not completely comparable.
[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v12i8.pdf
And so the effects of a fire 164 years ago screws up housing across the US today.
One of my favorite parts about Texas, at least on paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Advisory_Commission
I can't even put to words my embafflement upon having learnt that you US folks need two staircases.
That said, when looking at the reasons for fire safety in the U.S., there are many factors to consider which may or may not apply in parts of Europe
-- Frequency of wildfires. They are not uncommon in my southwest corner, so fire safety is taken very seriously
-- Proximity of emergency services. It can't be assumed that the local fire department is a few minutes drive away
-- Building materials. Materials that are fire-proof are rarely earthquake proof.
Any of these may or may not apply in any particular case but "embafflement" seems pretty extreme.
Many people in Europe do indeed identify as European. This has become more and more prevalent as people increasingly move around in Europe. I'd also argue that you are ignoring the cultural differences in the US (e.g. New Jersey vs Utah) something which I find Europeans are often guilty of.
> That said, when looking at the reasons for fire safety in the U.S., there are many factors to consider which may or may not apply in parts of Europe
> -- Frequency of wildfires. They are not uncommon in my southwest corner, so fire safety is taken very seriously
We are talking about multi (>4) story, multi family apartment buildings, how are wildfires relevant?
> -- Proximity of emergency services. It can't be assumed that the local fire department is a few minutes drive away
Again we are not talking about requirements for some cottage in the woods, these are city buildings. The whole argument is for buildings where you have space constraints.
> -- Building materials. Materials that are fire-proof are rarely earthquake proof.
Again I don't see the relevance, we are talking about a national building code, but only a tiny fraction of US cities are earthquake zones. The article also asserts that most Asian countries (which presumably includes Japan) have only one stairwell requirements.
> Any of these may or may not apply in any particular case but "embafflement" seems pretty extreme.
I actually agree if one needs to grasp for straws like these for reasons for the 2 stairwell rule, it is pretty baffling. The article actually nicely described the history and why it's outdated.
I suspect, though, that on both continents, when we’re talking about these problems with the dual staircase requirement in this context, we’re talking mainly about relatively high-density developments in space-constrained urban settings.
If, as the article claims, we’ve arrived at comparable fire fatality rates under the two policy regimes, it does seem like their prevailing standards neatly capture a tradeoff: it seems like you can add safety either by socializing a fire response infrastructure capable of quicker response, or you can privatize that extra margin of safety by imposing these second staircase costs on individual developments. I’d be curious how the total costs add up, I’m almost inclined to donate to the guy’s nonprofit just to get the answer to that.
I’d be curious how these changes would affect the economics of apartment blocks on huge greenfield suburban tracts, where parking requirements rather than staircase requirements seem to be the limiting factor space-wise. I’m thinking of the kind where space is cheap enough that they do surface lots rather than building parking decks into the structure. It seems like they tack exterior staircases on the edges of the building at not too much extra cost in those situations, but I suppose the floor plan implications must still come to bear.
Also, a lot more stuff is codified by law or treaties instead of by business and trade associations.
So, on this matter, it makes a lot of sense of speaking about the European experience.
There is finally progress on building codes for wildfire safety (called “WUI” codes).
It still has missing bits. For example, try to find a standard for a building air intake in an area subject to wildfires.
Don’t want to comment on missing emergency services in densely built areas but hope it isn’t the case it’s so bad you need an extra flight of stairs.
1. A ton of Health related websites in US refuse to work in Europe, because they are NOT willing to let you visit without sensitive data being grabbed with cookies. I truly do not understand how US people are ok with this.
2. The law says that you can't make hard to refuse cookies, yet many US-based sites I visit have shady, shady practices, for example many you have to click a button to see all the sliders for individual cookies, and when you click that button, it switches the orders of the buttons, so that the button you just clicked become "accept all", and the previous "accept all" button becomes "save current settings". Thus if you double click/tap by accident you accept all.
3. The sites that most often piss me off with shady cookie banner that tries its hardest to force you to opt-in to tracking, are ones that use a company called "Admiral", that according to LinkedIn is from Florida. https://www.linkedin.com/company/getadmiral/
OK, unintended consequences of legislation. But those cookie banners are not mandated, exactly. They don't need to be there. It's the companies deciding to do it that way, so they can keep gobbling data.
It's like if the building companies implemented the 2nd staircase, but only so they could measure who is going up and down it. Not for saving lives.
If they were opt in, or unnecessary tracking wasn't implemented in the first place, then the banners could be elegant or gone.
But I do agree that the legislation (especially the ultra focus on cookies specifically) was... blinkered & short sighted.
NYC fire escapes are world famous. If every sub-10 floor building can have a 2nd window fire escape.... then you can have your cake and eat it too.
It certainly would be interesting to see them make a comeback though.
There's a reasoned discussion to be had around fire safety regulations, but when you instantly make it about cultures and don't even try to understand, you're not being part of the solution -- you're part of the problem.
That aside, I fail to see any cultural or other reason to require twin staircases nowadays other than ‘that’s how we always did it here’. I admit it openly and state that I’m from somewhere where we don’t do that, and the world works just as well, except buildings have a higher useful to total area ratio.
You need a 2nd staircase for a multi-unit home that's over 2 storeys. If it weren't for the "multi-unit" part, there would be a lot of houses that would need to be built with a 2nd stair.
The second staircase is for the oversized pickup truck.
(And anyway the dual staircase thing isn’t even universal in the US).
That's because the word is "bafflement."
/s
I can't even put to words my embafflement upon learning that 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in Europe in 2017.
So that event is strictly specific to UK and not representative for Europe in general.
We visited Glasgow (Scotland) last summer and the hotel fire alarm went off the middle of the night (for whatever reason we seem to attract fire alarms while on family holidays)
After getting the kids dressed(ish) we exited the rooms, totally missing that there was one emergency staircase immediately opposite. There was a sign at ceiling height, at 90 degrees to us, which was basically invisible. There was no sign on the door to the staircase itself :/
So, we went all the way down the hall, along with a bunch of other guests, then I carried my 7 year-old down seven floors' worth of the secondary staircase stairs to the ground floor, really pretty slow progress due to the number of people, on exiting the building we met four fire engines plus a significant police presence, and hundreds of hotel guests. Turned out it wasn't a fire, but a disturbance, and a fire alarm had been activated as part of that. We were outside for ages.
Lesson learned: just as you hopefully do immediately after boarding an aircraft, check your exit routes well before you need them...
Took a while to learn to "check your exit routes", then? Or, ignoring any snark, you've learned a lot since "Glasgow (Scotland) last [S]ummer"?
Presumably the family had always found the exit routes easy to locate until the incident in Glasgow. So yes, that would be when they learned the lesson.
Nit: according to https://www.grammarly.com/blog/are-seasons-capitalized/, "The seasons—winter, spring, summer and fall—do not require capitalization."
They do not appeal to me, as I’m not fond of having to scale several flights of stairs, and the individual floors seem quite small, smaller than my first studio apartment.
My first town house was essentially three stories. The garage level, main living level, and a loft. But the main living space was the majority of the square footage so there was little routine need to scale the stairs.
Also the main living/dining/kitchen area shared with the loft offering a nice, high ceiling, and a roomy experience.
While I can certainly appreciate the benefits of the density these provide, the idea of living in several 400-500 sq ft boxes, especially connected with stairs, just doesn’t appeal to me, particularly as I age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
There are also double triple-deckers (six units)- the stairs are shared by two triple-deckers sharing a common wall. Most of these are side by side, but in Worcester, there are also front / back ones like this (134 Elm St.):
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2661816,-71.8159232,3a,75y,1...
or with turrets:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2662587,-71.8167573,3a,75y,2...
The stairs are definitely shared in the side-by-side ones, not sure how it works in these.
So I used to rent in a 10-unit five story brick and wood building with front and back stairs, so I question a bit that the two stair requirement is such a big deal. This building had a central open area, and an old (broken) cage style elevator. Something like this:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Taboo+Beauty+Salon/@42.264...
Imagine multifamily housing where each lot is the same as a single family lot. You can have varied types right next to each other (one building could house several seniors in small apartments, another could house several young people in smaller apartments, another could be the owner in a two floor "house" on the top to floors with rentals below, another could be a building comprised of entire floor flats that are each owner-occupied).
They can be redeveloped so much more easily or repurposed. When an entire block is a huge multifamily building, it's pretty much impossible to change anything about it.
But, we really need to also change how we finance these buildings. A big reason everything is the same these days is because the finance system underwrites them. The system is there for these other types of smaller buildings.
I've lived in single family homes and apartments in USA, Switzerland and Spain. I never understood why the apartment buildings in the USA felt so different, and now it makes sense. Even in my 15 story apartment in Zurich, there was a single stair. It made the apartment layouts much better, made it easier to make apartments with a lot more light, and many of the things this article talks about.
Now I live in Spain in a building from the 1960s. A 4 story apartment building, retrofitted in the 1980s with a tiny elevator. It's a really efficient design, though my wife and I have discussed that from an accessibility standpoint, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Now I understand the constraints of apartment designers in the USA a bit better!
Can any architects say whether that's absolutely true, within the constraints, or are solutions with different desirable properties possible?
Reason I'm asking: I've been looking at floorplans and renders for new condo and apartment buildings recently, and I wonder whether some of the decisions in layouts might've been phoned-in, without lots of creative or problem-solving work happening.
(Maybe it's like software, in which brilliant isn't normally demanded, so sometimes the work is approached more like a huge bulk of tediousness to slog through?)
(Or maybe some of the confusing decisions are due to solving larger constraints, like a $1M condo gets an inexplicably badly-positioned kitchen because the $3M condo above takes priority for where pipes run, and they're generally trying to minimize plumbing costs?)
Basically. Possible geometries relative to site limitations and building codes have been programmatically optimized to death to maximize number of units. There's not much hacking when living room + bedroom need windows. Occasionally there's a plot large enough where carving light wells / atriums makes sense. But developers would rather work on smaller plots that doesnt require wasting interior space, or larger plots where they can fit multiple buildings.
The most hilarius objection I could imagine is "nobody can have 2 refrigerators and 2 kitchens," coming from my brother who spent a fortune to renovate for exactly that.
A second laundry room can be handy, as can a second bathroom. A third laundry room can be converted to a closet with minor work to cover the washer/dryer connections and some shelves.
The central area would be another bedroom that has one doorway cut open and all the other doorways sheetrocked over.
One last thought, if you have never considered buying a duplex for a growing family and cutting in a door or two between the sides, you should. The "you can't do that" usually turns into "that's so cool" after a few hours.
Affordability problems in desirable locales already caused progressives to jettison anti-sprawl initiatives and environmental reviews.
It was only a matter of time before our gaze shifted to building codes and life safety provisions as cost-adds that "we" should all work against.
It does not gratify me in any way to have foreseen this.
> Affordability problems in desirable locales already caused progressives to jettison anti-sprawl initiatives and environmental reviews.
> It was only a matter of time before our gaze shifted to building codes and life safety provisions as cost-adds that "we" should all work against.
So if your safety provisions yield worse outcomes than other places is it not time to review those regulations? Do you actually care about safety or just about your confirmation bias that "progressives are doing something bad"?
I am one of those progressives.
I just haven’t flip-flopped on sprawl and open space and environmental review based on my current economic outlook.
I follow these matters closely in my state and others, but have never heard a single instance of either of these!
Could you point to some examples, because I would love to know more, and have not found and examples by searching the web.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/news-updates/2023/07/28/biden...
Chicago is chock-full of old houses converted to three-flats. Most of those flats have large balconies on the back... with a staircase. These balconies provide fresh air and nice views at a price point where both of those things are otherwise impossible to find.
So yes, my counterpoint is "but I like the second staircase." But, I really do - a lot of people do, and I don't see why landlords would build those things if they weren't required to.
It sounds like you're describing an external staircase - loosely speaking a fire escape. I could be wrong though, I'm not sure.
The article was discussing the requirement for _fully enclosed_ internal staircases, which is different.
These also have the added bonus of being generally a nicer staircase than the one that's actually built into the house. The interior, retrofitted staircases tend to be narrow with lots of awkward, angled steps.
https://chicagoreader.com/best-of-chicago/business-in-the-fr...
Building codes are just a way to say, you won't get in trouble for bad things that happen, in return you have to follow these rules every time you build a house.
Instead if we just say, if you build a house that kills someone, you are now a murderer, then yeah I think the markets can figure out how to not get people killed. But that's not going to happen for lots of reasons.
After all, it's a simple enough matter to start a new company, trade for 3-5 years, pay yourself some big dividends then declare bankruptcy and start a new company with a very similar name and set of employees.
Furthermore, the construction of larger buildings often allows for a merry-go-round of blame shifting. The architect specifies fireproof material 'or equivalent', the main contractor outsources parts of the design to specialist suppliers, the specialist suppliers trust marketing materials, the material manufacturers had small print saying people should run their own tests, the specialist fire consultant didn't raise the alarm about a change but he stopped getting paid a third of the way through the project, the contractors thought the building inspectors were checking for safety, the building inspectors thought they were a secondary safety net and responsibility lay with the designers... and so on.
If it meets code and passes inspection, why are design problems the builder’s fault? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.
Find root cause, and make that entity liable
But in contrast to the average American city, the average "European" city (let's just go with the generality) is much more "regulated" in this area. Planning permission is much harder to come by, and questions like whether a building can get by -safely- with a single stair is part of that vetting process. But it's very definitely just one aspect of the review.
I have extensive experience with California, having worked there for over a decade and even having passed the California Supplemental Exam. Folks are absolutely 100% correct that environmental and community planning review processes are routinely abused by those with clout to maintain scarcity of the resource they possess. "Those with clout" typically means wealthy homeowners and large developers who want to shut smaller parties out of the process.
Anyway, much more to say about this and I might chime in if I get the chance. But I love that the discussion is happening. The system in the US is pretty universally broken. But TL;DR the cause is not as simple as "less regulation good!" or "more regulation good!"
I assert that people generally understand building safety codes to have been written in blood: the rule exists only because once upon a time it didnt, and people died. Fire exits and Triangle Shirtwaist, that sort of thing.
Coupled with the equally strong perception that property developers and builders will take any shortcut to make a buck, and the ideas in this article are simply dead on arrival. The public will vote with their wallets and stay away.
What requires a common hallway? The example single-stair plans seem like an equal number of staircases could be bolted on the back, giving every unit a second egress.
Effectively, the building code they are talking about the value of changing. Fully enclosed stairways at the back for each "slice" would be cost prohibitive, and exterior "fire escape" type stairs are not allowed either.
It's worse if you do stairs to a central landing and multiple units off that landing, where there's simply no way to add a single stairway that addresses all the units.
[1] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
-walk into a licensed firearm dealer
-show government ID (e.g. drivers license)
-fill out ATF form 4473 (approx. two pages)
-wait for background check (called NICS, Near Instance Criminal Background Check System)
-pay for firearm
Did I miss any steps?
Way too many people are forced to move into big cities simply for work, even though they really wouldn't want to. It's bad for them, and bad for those who actually want to live in those areas, but can't afford it.
yes?
Why have regulations if they are enormously expensive and don't actually do anything for safety?
See: martial law as a legal precedent.
Why isn't it one big ladder?
As I understand it, land value and improvements are already taxed but a land value tax would only tax land value.
Can someone make this make sense? Why would this promote development?
+-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
| Type | Land Value | Cover Value | Total Value |
+-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
| Parking Lot | 100 | 0 | 100 |
| Dump | 100 | -20 | 80 |
| Skyscrapper | 100 | 100 | 200 |
+-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
+-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
| Type | Land Value | Cover Value | Total Value |
+-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
| Parking Lot | 150 | 0 | 150 |
| Dump | 150 | -20 | 130 |
| Skyscrapper | 150 | 100 | 250 |
+-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
In other words, the taxable value of the land is what it would be if it had similar improvements to surrounding lands, rather than taxing it based on actual improvements.
LVT is very close in structure to this perfect tax. There is a finite amount of land available, and no way to make more of it; taxes on land don't disincentivize land production, they just take a cut of the rent that you get from having conquered that land first or bought it from someone who did. And the land value (exclusive of improvements) is usually set by its location - what else is nearby, what community improvements have been made, is it in a pretty place, is there lots of pollution or crime? These too are things that the owner has no control of; arguably they are reaping the benefits of things that the rest of the community has built, and so they should be taxed on it so the fruits of those labor go back to the community.
By excluding the improvements, you let the land owner capture the fruits of their actual labor. So if they build a new apartment building and provide housing to those who need it, they can charge rent, and they won't be taxed on that rent, and so they capture the full benefit of those improvements. If it's a nice apartment building, they get to charge more in rent, and they can capture that money too.
I just tried it out and ChatGPT helps if you want to understand this. It is quite patient and will provide instant responses.
So you move all tax to just the land value at a higher rate than present, then let people build to offset the tax.
But why take Barcelona as an example? These superblocks are horrible. Barcelona is noisy, stressful and impersonate (plus there are shitloads of pickpockets and serious issues between independentists and nationalists).
There's a middle ground between one house per family and these fugly superblocks.
You know why people like me suffocate so much in Barcelona? Because Franco (a dictator) allowed the Comarcal plan: cheap housing and allowing buildings to become much higher. And unsurprisingly it all turned to shit.
Superblocks came much later and were an answer to that past SNAFU where these high, gigantic blocks created an unlivable city. Superblocks are at best a band aid which doesn't fix Barcelona's root issue: these blocks (no matter if they're grouped by 9 in superblocks) are simply completely oppressive.
Where I live (another EU country) all the buildings are semi-detached (so it's always two buildings together), four stories / eight apartments per building. So sixteen families for two "attached buildings". And, contrarily to Barcelona, people can breathe here. There's five times two attached buildings, disposed in an "U" shape. So it's open (not closed like these fugly blocks in Barcelona). There's a shared park and below the buildings are the parking spaces (all shared). There are I take it about 80 apartments altogether. Next block: repeat something similar. But there's room. It's not suffocating. It's not alienating.
And all these blocks are facing a "Natura 2000" protected forest: nothing shall ever be constructed there. Nature: I'm sure some city planners have at least heard the word "nature".
You know what I did today? I didn't use the car. I left my single-stair multifamily and went for a walk in that forest, with my family, walking in the snow (there's been a snowstorm last night).
Explain me, when I'm in block 298 in superblock XKY, surrounded by countless superblocks, how do I get to nature?
I mean, yeah: it's nice to try to fix housing. But it's 2024 and by now people have figured out better arrangements than those created under a dictator in Spain.
Touche. They are two different contributors to costs, and I wouldn't have commented if I weren't currently frustrated by high housing costs.
Former farmlands are cheap, dense areas are super expensive. The market has spoken, yet we continue to undersupply density by regulatory fiat, against the will of the people.
The norm in europe is one staircase and one elevator. The elevator is the accessible bit.
Anyone with anything more debilitating should steer clear.
London's Grenfell Towers would like to have a word with you.
That means local shops can pop up, and city centers are able to progressively transition upwards at the edges (and plots can be upzoned) instead of having a sea of low-density housing suddenly becoming a bunch of skyscrapers.
Every time someone nudges "the workforce" closer and closer to the 2-penny hangovers you can be sure he has a downtown penthouse, a suburban mansion, or both, and hope to scalp bottom-feeder market once regulations are laxed.
Housing estates in Europe manage it by having proper balconies that can be used as exits, but also having share walk ways out the front.
Not only can you have two or more exits, it also means that you can secure the building more easily as there are less doors to secure.
take this estate: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RXscnAJaDRCLausL9
there are 200 flats, a mix of 1-4 bedrooms. The biggest flats are about 85m2 (~1000sqft) every flat has a separate kitchen, living room and toilet/bathroom.
There are four exits to ground level on the "C" (the top, right and bottom of the block) they are secured by keyfob. Each landing is then secured by another keyfob.
In case of fire, the balcony divider can be pushed open allowing refuge in the next flat.
These flats are made of concrete, and there are only 4 holes into the flat above/below, meaning that fire doesn't spread. That estate has a fire at least once every 2 years, and it only affects one flat.
I can also confirm that most apartment buildings in Germany, France, Scandinavia, Austria and Italy (that I'm familiar with) have only 1 stairwell (note that's different to exists, many have at least 2 exits). From what I have seen they apartments (like the article asserts) tend to have much nicer layouts with more light.
It’s not only fire that’s a hazard, but a personal safety thing. Most men here probably never experienced being stalked, or having to turn around when your path is through a group of shady characters.
In the Midwest, brick/concrete fire stairwells have another benefit: tornado shelters. While a sufficient tornado would decimate any wooden structure, these stairwells provide essential protection from the main hazard in a tornado: flying debris.
Offhand I can think of a dozen more reasons. Lets not reverse sensible progress in the name of profits and tax revenue.
Having lived in both Santiago, Chile and San Francisco with a family, I’d say generally the quality of life is higher (schools, restaurants, opportunities) in major cities in the US, but it’s easier live as family (without a car) in Santiago. Having relatives in Europe I think this is also true.
I’m not sure if removing this limitation fixes that, but without high density 3+ bedroom housing you don’t get families (especially middle class families)
Affordable housing. Every edge case preference accommodated. Pick one.