Summary:
- Allowing “single-stair” apartment buildings would make multifamily housing more affordable
- Single-stair reform can allow for better homes, not just cheaper ones
- Outdated fire codes can be remedied by lawmaker action
North Carolina, like America generally, faces a cost-of-living crisis, of which the cost of housing is major part. Rent and mortgage costs have become a major burden for people of all walks of life. Housing costs have gone up primarily because not enough housing is being built, and supply hasn’t kept up with demand. To bring housing costs down, policymakers need to make it easier to build more housing. One way to do that is to remove regulatory barriers for builders that may have once sense, but don’t anymore.
Which brings us to single-stair buildings.
What is “single-stair?”
A “single-stair” building is just what it sounds like: an apartment building with just one staircase. Today, these are largely illegal to build, due to outdated fire codes (see below). But single-stair buildings can help a lot with housing problems.
Building only one staircase into a building means that builders can use more space for living area. It not only lowers construction costs (building more stairs adds costs), but it also increases the amount of available housing space, bringing down total cost-per-square-foot. Builders can also fit single-stair buildings into smaller or more oddly-shaped parcels of land. In urban areas where the housing crisis is often worst, that describes a significant portion of real estate available for housing construction.
The bottom line: single-stair means more places to live, and they’re more affordable.
And yet: it’s illegal to build single-stair apartments in most of the United States. The reason is because of outdated fire codes, most many decades old, that were designed for a different era. Those fire codes require every unit in a multi-story building to have access to two staircases. The idea at the time was to help people get out during a fire, which was very sensible, particularly since many buildings of the era were constructed with wood. But since those codes were written, construction technology has come a very long way with regards to construction materials, sprinkler systems and fire escapes. Most apartment building formats no longer truly need two stairways for safety, but building codes in most U.S. states and cities haven’t kept pace.
Safety is paramount
Double-stair fire codes were primarily designed for wood buildings. In the bad old days, wooden apartment buildings could go up in flames so quickly that people needed multiple routes to escape in time. Today, single-stair buildings can be made from fireproof and fire-resistant materials like brick and concrete. Sprinklers, fire doors, fire ladders, and more also keep fires from spreading quickly. Single-stair apartments with these features have a strong track record of safety. Even better, the savings from single-stair construction are so significant that even with additional fire safety features, single-stair apartments are still cheaper to build.
Single-stair fire codes are common in the European Union. In the Netherlands, a type of single-stair apartment buildings was actually found to have the lowest fire risk of all housing types. They have balconies where people can be reached by fire rescue instead of having to flee through smoke-filled interior hallways. In Seattle and New York City, where single-stair fire codes are already in place, there have been zero fire-related deaths in single-stair buildings in over a decade.
Better apartments, not just more of them
Old fire codes are why most apartment buildings today look almost identical: big, blocky buildings with a hallway down the middle. They’re also why the apartments in those buildings can feel a bit like a tunnel from the hallway to the window. When buildings are required by building codes to have a hallway down the middle, that’s about the only shape of apartment that can be built. As a result, and thanks to limited space, most apartments built with double-stair codes tend to be studios and one-bedrooms.
Enough bedrooms to raise a family, with natural light, or cross-breezes: those should be normal things to expect from a home. But thanks to double-stair codes, those are often reserved for suburban tract housing – or for those wealthy enough to buy up an entire building floor.
With single stair, builders have more flexibility. They can build larger, but still reasonably-sized apartments that wrap around corners or reach both sides of a building. That’s lots of nice units that middle- and working-class families could afford. Single stair means normal people can live comfortably. It makes city living economically sustainable for families, which is a very important part of making our cities work.
What’s next?
Oregon, Washington, and California legalized single-stair builds in 2024. Honolulu did so in 2012. And several other states, including Virginia, are now working on their own bills. North Carolina’s lawmakers should follow suit. North Carolina’s own housing crisis needs sensible, pragmatic responses, and we don’t have to keep making it worse by outlawing practical, safe, comfortable places for people to live.
