The case for single-stair multifamily | Hacker News Reader

The case for single-stair multifamily

thesisdriven.com

351 pointsjbrins1550 comments

This is a fantastic article.

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.

Don't forget about street widths being determined by the ability to turn around fire equipment.

If it makes you feel any better the oldest streets around here are wider than newer ones, because they had to be able to turn a wagon with a team of horses.

That sounds like what they did in Salt Lake City.

This was the seed that destroyed the American city. Roads were humongous 100 years before car was invented. It was fine, a buffer for the smoke and filth of the industrial city, but still multipurpose, accessible. Once cars started driving on these huge expanses, it turned every city street in a highway; dangerous, polluted, noisy, pushing out other uses, ...

Hm.. couldn't a fire engine be driven in reverse? It could have an emergency driver's wheel in the back. I have seen crane trucks driven with a joystick from outside the vehicle, so it doesn't seem impossible.

Or it could just be smaller like in the rest of the world.

Having streets unable to be accessible by fire response vehicles doesn't seem like a good idea. What would be the alternative here? (genuine question, I'm not from the US)

Smaller fire trucks.

How do you plan to make the fires smaller as well?

Copy paste from Europe, where they are about half the size?

Some possible reasons for why American fire trucks tend to be larger:

* more frequently sent to rural homes, where there might not be an available hydrant, so they need to transport all the water they're likely to need

* same for wildfires

* American homes more likely to be wood+drywall

Why "wood+drywall" rather than just "wood"?

Drywall is non-combustible and used as the main component in many fire-rated wall assemblies.

I would simply have small firetrucks in urban areas, and large fire trucks in rural areas.

The more rural you get, the more likely it is that the fire trucks have been purchased secondhand from urban fire departments that can afford to buy new equipment prior to the existing equipment literally falling apart (I've got an extended family member that runs the fire service for an entire county in a western US state, and often see him when he stops at my house while driving new-to-them equipment from the east coast).

You've also got a lot of volunteer departments where each firefighter keeps their equipment in their own personal vehicle.

Why firetrucks in the US are so large is a good question. In the spirit of Chesterton's Fence, I'd assume that there is a good reason until proven otherwise.

That's utterly impossible. It's the same reason America can't have public transit: since it doesn't make economic sense in small remote towns of 200 people, then it can't be done in huge cities. I can't explain the logic, but this really is how most Americans think.

Europe has wildfires and rural areas. How will a large fire truck help you when a wood house is burning? Being grotesquely large doesn't mean they put the fire out faster.

B-b-b-b-but bUY amERiCa

Use two trucks when needed?

This is a really simple fix that the rest of the world does better.

Indeed, this is a thoroughly solved problem thanks to countries like Japan where urban planning typically allows meandering networks of narrow, pedestrian-friendly streets.

This article has some nice points of comparison between typical American firetrucks and a Japanese firetruck: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Meet-Kiri-the-tiny...

And yet, European cities exist and are fine without wide streets.

Keep in mind that Europeans tend to build with stone / bricks, and Americans tend to build with wood.

Lots of safety regulations stem from that divide. Wood is a bit more flammable.

(I'm not saying the difference in safety regulations still make sense today. I'm talking about one of the historical origins of the divide.)

In the north of Europe it is mostly wood

Houses are still less likely to be build from wood than in the US.

apartment buildings are made from prefabricated concrete elements though

We can make them turn 360 degrees like the electric G-Wagon. If upgrading the fleet of firefighting trucks to do so costs less than the value brought by tighter spacing of homes, it’s worth it.

Well, you can learn from other parts of the world, instead of coming up with solutions from scratch. (But yes, if nothing else your solution would probably work.)

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.

looks like building heights haven't been held back...

Just curious, are there any regulations on housing you agree with? There tends to be belief that housing regulations exist to limit supply. Let's not forget that many of these encourage safety and are cost effective ways to increase the quality of life of the residents. If we take deregulation and cheap housing to the extreme we end up with shanty towns.

None of the things he mentioned have anything to do with safety.

Environmental review, community review, and MFH standards all have something to do with safety. It's not like root comment is arguing against fire hydrants or carbon monoxide detectors. I'm just arguing not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Setbacks, parking minimums and floor area ratios have nothing to do with safety. Community reviews have absolutely nothing to do with safety.

> Community review

Any feedback brought up in a community review is on official record. I have witnessed safety concerns being brought up in community review multiple times that caused changes to the building plan. In one situation it was a very serious concern about blocking fire truck access to an elementary school.

why didn't the code catch that?

The code doesn't catch anything. People catch violations of the code. Community review is a place people can point out code violations. It's actually extremely embarrassing when this happens to a developer.

Buildings get built with infractions all the time. With the MFH buildings it's actually a point of law to see who gets stuck with the liability -- the person that built it or the person that bought it.

Careful with those absolutes.

Side setbacks absolutely have an effect on fire safety (a greater distance gives less propensity to ignite the neighboring building and provides access with which to fight the original structure fire).

Front setbacks and lot area coverage ratios have a more minor version of this same effect from fires across the street. It takes a pretty good sized fire to ignite the building across a street, but as density increases and more of a lot's area is able to covered with structures, the chances to get a pretty good sized fire going do increase.

Ya. My setback is 3 feet, definitely just a margin for fire safety. I wanted to put an awning in but couldn't because it would be too close to the fence of my property boundary (I live in a town home that abuses the 3 foot setback to maximize living space).

I have minimum lot size of 5 acres. Can't see the wisdom in that one. I also have a minimum square footage size. $20,000 impact fee just to build a house and I receive no utilities or city/ county services.

I wish more than anything we could legislate the fee structures backwards. If the government wants an environmental impact study then the government is footing the bill for it. Putting it on the builder is stupid and just a way of hiding the budget item in other people's wallets.

Ok, the government will fund your environmental impact study so you can build, but...oh...given their budget they will have it done sometime in 2100.

> Side setbacks absolutely have an effect on fire safety

Sure, but is the benefit worth the cost? Manhattan and denser European cities without those haven't burned down since we fireproofed building materials

And yet other areas let buildings be physically against each other if they're built not to spread fire. Just let everyone do that.

We have zoning and internationally recognized building safety codes already.

Our current housing emergency happening everywhere is a pretty good indicator that we should be much more aggressive about trimming back the regulatory state which has ossified our cities.

Your argument doesn't really make sense because the problem isn't lack of houses or apartments, there's plenty of places to put everyone. The problem is one of affordability. The costs of stuff that already exists and has existed for ages isn't really tied to the current cost to build, even if we buy the specious argument that all regulation raises costs and those costs are inevitably passed directly to tenants.

supply and eemand sets rents. You you rent perfecly good existing houses cheap in rural areas. Nobody wants to like there.

There is no reason to think there is enourh room for everyone who wants to like in San Francisco, and statistics prove they heve not been building much. Mean while in other states we find areas of demand where housing is not expensive. Where I live you can rent one bedroom apartments for under $1000, mohe in won't be until spring as the building is still under construction. The owners are planning on starting the next building when this is done. That is what allosing building does.

Supply, demand, and cartels like Realpage.

Cartel's can't just magically set prices.

They can withhold supply, and that might have an effect on market prices.

You can't pay the mortgage on a place you're not renting out though, so they mostly can't withhold supply.

It applies more to things like retired people living by themselves in a 3 bedroom house.

OK.

Though if they can't withhold supply, how are those cartels supposed to hold up prices, then?

They don't, it's not real.

(Except that they can prevent construction of new units through zoning.)

Ehm, what? Of course cartels can magically set prices. That's what a cartel is for: to make collusion easier.

Even OPEC can't magically set prices. Cartels make collusion easier, but you still have to do concrete steps to raise market prices.

OPEC does that via production cuts. Or rather tries to do that.

Real estate has very distributed ownership and none of them are motivated to form a cartel.

The only way they can maintain one is through legal force. Zoning laws are almost entirely that force; they're a way to establish a cartel of homeowners.

This is just factually not true. There is plenty of empty homes, apartments and condos to house everyone. There are many units kept empty rather than lower prices. It is a myth that supply and demand sets prices.

This comment makes me really sad; it's someone who wants to help but ends up hurting.

There is also the effect of rich people needing a place to stash money and not wanting to bother with tennants

Housing activists in Melbourne have been campaigning about that for years now

I did not believe that was true until I stumbled on it happening. A rich lawyer, a salary far too big to spend, so they collected (empty) houses. They did not care about cash flow

A tax on empty houses in areas with accommodation shortage at worse cannot hurt and at best could free up a lot of accommodation

> Nobody wants to li[v]e there.

It would be better to say that rents are lower in rural areas because there is either more supply or lower median salary.

Zoning is already pretty bad (at least in the US), and doesn't really have anything to do with safety.

In the sense that even without zoning laws, there were already public nuisance laws that wouldn't have allowed you to open a coal fired power plant next to a Kindergarten.

Zoning laws have a lot to do with safety & public health. Industrial zoning is far away from residential because factories produce pollution.

Edit: Some parts of zoning law has to do with safety/health. Some parts don't. Some parts are about more than one thing.

When I was growing up there was a chemical fire in a factory in town. People were evacuated. Luckily, very few homes were evacuated because zoning laws kept homes far away from the factory. The residential area that was evacuated was low density.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is some value in some of these rules.

Okay, what is the safety reason my barber can’t operate out of a room in his house?

No reason. Countries like Japan have reasonable zoning, meaning industrial uses are separate, but commercial and residential is largely interspersed. Which is great!

That's easy: your barber operating a business out of his house will result in customers coming to your neighborhood, and that might bring "those people" around, and we can't have that.

That's ridiculous. Those people can't get even get to the neighborhood because the residents have gone out of their way to eliminate public transit (which is for poors).

It's all relative. Plenty of poorer people have cars, but instead of $150k cars, they have cheap-o $25k cars. We can't have those kind of people in our neighborhood.

Here in Singapore, we only have about 1 million licenses for cars total. They are auctioned off to the highest bidder.

So there are no cheap-o $25k cars. (The car itself might be cheap, but you need the license to run it.)

My description in this context is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but this is actually a great system given the limited road space we have here. And auctioning off the licenses is about the most economically efficient way to allocate them.

Here in Tokyo, they do things a little differently (and pretty sensibly I think): you simply can't own and register a car in the city unless you have a place to park it. So you have to get some kind of proof from the police showing they've certified you have a parking space that will fit the car, and they come out with a measuring tape to check too, based on the car's actual dimensions. So if you can afford a parking place, you can own a car. Otherwise, no. So car prices are subject to market forces and not artificially constrained; the constraint is the actual land area available for parking, and that's subject to market forces too, since it could be used for something else like a building, so parking tends to be expensive.

Side answer. This kind of regulation lifts GDP by mandating some sort of economic activity. A barber in a room in his house means less rental, less money for commercial real estate company, less money spent buying "commercial" chairs and commercial chemicals. And thousands of other things I can't even fathom as the scope of this problem is huge and so intertwined with all other economic activity.

That’s nonsense. It does not lift GDP any more than breaking windows does. It redirects labor and capital from one use to another.

What are you on about? It does the exact opposite.

I can’t believe I’m seeing this on HN.

What do you mean? This is a perfectly possible / valid theory, you're welcome to try poke at it if you're open to debate instead of dismissing me.

It's the broken window fallacy. There's literally a fallacy named after the very thing you're espousing.

Pollution laws protect against industrial operations polluting other areas, not zoning.

The real "pollution" they zoning was invented to solve was the "pollution" of residents of apartments living close to wealthier people. Seriously! Check out how the original Supreme Court decision phrased its motivation:

> “very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district …. interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes.”

Here's a more extensive analysis from an org purporting to represent real estate, the source of much historical support for this sort of exclusionary zoning:

https://cre.org/real-estate-issues/americas-sordid-history-o...

Yes, there's some value in some of these rules.

However by and large, the value that would be provided by zoning is already provided (and used to be provided) by other rules not falling under the bucket of 'zoning'. Especially not 'Euclidean zoning'.

Usually when people discuss zoning it excludes things like industrial zoning and focuses on single family zoning vs multi-family zoning. In this case, yes, zoning needs to be deregulated. Zoning for housing should be zoning for housing and whether it is single or multi family shouldn't matter. But we should keep the industrial zoning from being put next to an Elementary school.

>internationally recognized building safety codes

I mean, the "International Building Code" is a little bit like the "World Series"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code

>"Calling it 'international' keeps it from being called the 'U.S. Building Code.'" explains Bill Tangye, SBCCI Chief Executive Officer.

> Our current housing emergency happening everywhere is a pretty good indicator that we should be much more aggressive about trimming back the regulatory state which has ossified our cities.

That isn't true though. Our housing emergency is limited to places that are growing and thriving. There isn't a housing emergency in Detroit or much of the midwest for example, just not many are thrilled about moving to those places (or want to leave them as soon as possible).

Those places that don't have housing emergencies generally have just as bad regulations, and would have the same problems the instant they became appealing enough to move there. Eventually you run out of built out sprawl.

> hose places that don't have housing emergencies generally have just as bad regulations, and would have the same problems the instant they became appealing enough to move there.

If American population was equalized across these other cities, there would be less pressure on the few hot places everyone wants to move now, since our population isn't growing so much these days.

> Eventually you run out of built out sprawl.

Manhattan is not a sprawl and a very desirable place to live, with super high rents to boot. Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and even Tokyo are the same, so I'm not sure what you are trying to claim here. Out of all those, only Tokyo does well, but that wasn't the case in the 80s and is on the basis of a moribund economy and a not growing national population (one wonders when Seoul and SH will follow). IF you want to solve your housing emergency, limit growth in some way (or at least, make sure residents don't have as much money to bid up housing).

>Manhattan is not a sprawl and a very desirable place to live, with super high rents to boot. Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and even Tokyo are the same, so I'm not sure what you are trying to claim here.

Those cities are actually impossible to have in America (yes, including Manhattan), because of zoning laws and various other laws. Manhattan is only allowed to exist because it's grandfathered in and the local laws allow it. Such a city could never be built anywhere else in the US without some huge changes in legislation (not to mention local culture, since that drives the local legislation).

>IF you want to solve your housing emergency, limit growth in some way

Tokyo works because growth isn't limited: it's very easy to build here, unlike in the US. Tokyo builds hundreds of thousands of new housing units every single year, while the US struggles to build any. This is entirely because of regulations.

Fun fact: the US and Italy have about the same number of elevators, because it costs us about ten times more to build one.

I've seen be some terrifying elevators in Italy.

More about Tokyo new units here: https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/361409_dcd56370...

Title = How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

TL;DR: Since 1995 (yes, during the lost decade) they are building ~150k new "dwellings" per year. Wow.

How many are they tearing down to rebuild? Buildings only last ~20-30 years in Japan, so a lot of those are just replacing something that was torn down.

> Buildings only last ~20-30 years in Japan

This is a myth in central Tokyo.

> Out of all those, only Tokyo does well, but that wasn't the case in the 80s and is on the basis of a moribund economy and a not growing national population (one wonders when Seoul and SH will follow).

Japan's economy is growing again (Nikkei is now at the level it was in 1990) and Tokyo's population has always been growing.

…but the rent isn't, because they allow infill development.

> IF you want to solve your housing emergency, limit growth in some way

This makes about as much sense as fucking for virginity

From what I've seen of environmental review laws, they mostly just have to do with noise and construction nuisance. Whereas community review is mostly about aesthetics. I don't think these are the tools designed for safety.

In practice, the <environmental stuff> has mostly been used by non-environmentalists to delay development they simply don't like. (This one has to do specifically with CA, but it's not the first time I've seen this complaint.)

"Projects designed to advance California’s environmental policy objectives are the most frequent targets of CEQA lawsuits: transit is the most frequently challenged type of infrastructure project (edging out challenges to both highways and local roadways); renewable energy is the most frequently challenged type of industrial/utility project; and housing (especially higher-density housing) is the most frequently challenged type of private-sector project."

"Our study found repeated examples of intentional efforts to cloak the identity of CEQA litigants behind environmental-sounding names of fake and even unlawful “associations.”"

https://www.planningreport.com/2015/12/21/new-ceqa-study-rev...

I'm clueless on the subject and don't intend to argue the point, but it struck me that the metric that article consistently uses is one that almost guarantees the results: It's not surprising to learn that the categories that have the greatest amount of activity by far are the ones with the most CEQA challenges.

The point would be much stronger if it was made in terms the rate of challenges for varrious project types rather then in terms of frequency of CEQA challenges being that kind of project.

The assumption I'd draw from that, being ignorant of the subject, is that the argument is unsupportable on that more reasonable basis.

Double stair Vs single stair is totally a safety issue

One that much of Europe has mitigated somehow.

It is all about the scenario where you die in a single stair where the second stair would have saved you being probably non existent in c21. Especially as you will have fire doors.

I reckon single is safer: no decision to make as you exit.

By building their buildings out of brick rather than wood. Though its probably overkill here in the states and canada.

Even our wood has so much fire safety chemicals baked in now that it's not nearly as flammable as it used to be. The safety standards should be reevaluated. Plus, I'm sure that there are some developers who would happily build the whole MFH out of concrete if it lets them only use a single stair.

Concrete construction is expensive in the states, although I'm not sure why. 4+1s are common here in Seattle: first story is concrete and commercial, 4 stories on top of that are wooden (we also have the more liberal stair requirements, so I'm not sure what is really going on).

Concrete construction is the common way to build in China (and anywhere in Asia sans Japan), but the techniques they use require a bit of overbuilding and limit their towers to around 34 or so stories. Still, they have two stair cases side by side in those buildings (but I guess given the height, they need them by Chinese fire code standards).

>Concrete construction is the common way to build in China (and anywhere in Asia sans Japan)

Concrete-reinforced steel is absolutely common here in Japan. Wood is used for single-family homes, though, but anything larger is generally concrete+steel.

>but the techniques they use require a bit of overbuilding and limit their towers to around 34 or so stories.

Modern condo towers around me here in Tokyo are frequently 50 stories AFAICT. And that's with extremely strict building codes for earthquake protection. I can't tell you about the stairs though, as I don't live in one.

I was in Tokyo recently and didn’t see much talk building growth m, maybe I didn’t go to the right neighborhoods.

China leveraged construction techniques that use unskilled and lower skilled migrant labor, so building height is limited. Other countries that import Chinese and Indian to build (like Singapore) get similar limitations.

> None of the things he mentioned have anything to do with safety.

I quibble. Mentioned double stair

I thought of Grenfell Tower block

That was catastrophic partly because the one stairwell filled with smoke

> If we take deregulation and cheap housing to the extreme we end up with shanty towns.

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.

I use to look at buying a 60+ year old condo/coop on the west coast, until I looked at the earthquake statistics and safety standards of brick multistory buildings. Now I know why the newer steel buildings cost 2-6x the old brick buildings in the same neighborhood.

I’m doubtful they actually cost more to construct?

You already have shanty towns with all the regulation.

Making housing cheaper also means making higher quality housing cheaper.

We don't really have shanty towns in the states. We definitely don't have a Kowloon Walled City, which is an example of what can happen when no regulations are involved (and somewhat remarkably not burn down and kind of thrive even if still a slum).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

> We don't really have shanty towns in the states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tent_cities_in_the_Uni...

Tent cities != shanty towns. Shanty towns are like semi-permanent buildings, tents are just...tents you buy at REI and then set up at the park with your stuff. We had one nearby my house at the Seattle Ballard commons that lasted during COVID (and is gone now). I wouldn't have called it a shanty town like I saw in the Philippines.

Go to skid row in LA. Going on 50 years or more.

If only we can have something between a McMansion filled North American suburb and Kowloon Walled City.

Hong Kong is super dense and super expensive, Shanghai is similar, but at Mainland Chinese prices. I'm all for density, but anyone who thinks that density alone solves affordability issues simply hasn't travel enough.

Density is a way to deal with expensive housing. Not a cause of it.

Density is a way to make cities more livable and attractive, and to scale up public transit investments.

After you've done all this, you'll find that your city is more expensive than the surrounding cities without, not less.

Eh, Skid Row is pretty famous, but if you're willing to broaden the definition a little the US has lots of slums [0].

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/more-am...

Maybe it's OK if some housing is less perfect and closer to ashanty town. I'd rather live in a shanty town than a cardboard box under the freeway. If nobody wants to live in the "shanty town" nobody will move in and no investor will want to build another one. I sometimes think that the provocative way of putting all this is that we need more slum lords. They filled a need.

> Making housing cheaper also means making higher quality housing cheaper.

Or, much more likely, builder profits higher.

Nothing wrong with that.

Competition will sort that out.

Physical safety (structural integrity and fire safety), noise transmission and ventilation. I think regulations around these 3 aspects can help more than they hurt. Beyond these items, I would be skeptical.

> There tends to be belief that housing regulations exist to limit supply.

It is often more the case that limited supply is an unintended outcome. People just don’t think ahead.

>limited supply is an unintended outcome.

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.

The people who attend council meetings are not at all representative of the general myopia that results in so much regulation.

Yes, I have also attended such meetings and interact with NIMBYs. They are part of the problem. General myopia is the bigger problem.

> There tends to be belief that housing regulations exist to limit supply.

Also to enrich union tradespeople. See prohibitions against PEX plumbing and requirements for electrical conduit instead of Romex.

How is double stair MFH overzealous? I can’t control if my neighbor blocks the stairwell with a couch that gets stuck while he’s moving in and now I have no egress if my other neighbor starts a fire.

I’m in favor of greater freedoms, and the freedom to choose a single stair MFH if I want.

But I don’t want.

A couch and a fire and that couch can't be pushed over or jumped over... That's quite a contrived scenario. I suspect that most of the improvements in the fire safety record of apartment buildings have to do with other factors like materials used, fireproof stair doors, etc etc. The reason I think the two stairs don't do much is that first world countries exist outside North America, they don't have this rule, and their fire safety is just as good or better than ours.

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.

> A couch and a fire and that couch can't be pushed over or jumped over.

Not everyone is young and in shape to push couches or jump over them.

So even more contrived

If you have mobility issues that prevent you from exiting your building easily then you can move somewhere else. We don’t need to make every apartment building in the country more expensive for this extremely specific scenario.

I can go up and down unobstructed stairs without any issues, but I have back problems which keep me from doing heavy lifting and I'm in no condition to jump or climb over a sofa in the middle of a flight of stairs.

The real problem here is expecting people to be able bodied enough to deal with a lack of alternative exits when someone in the same building inevitably is careless enough to start a fire.

>A couch and a fire and that couch can't be pushed over or jumped over... That's quite a contrived scenario. I suspect that most of the improvements in the fire safety record of apartment buildings have to do with other factors like materials used, fireproof stair doors, etc etc.

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?

> A couch and a fire and that couch can't be pushed over or jumped over...

You’re 85.

Or maybe they have small children. Wtf man.

> I can’t control if my neighbor blocks the stairwell with a couch that gets stuck while he’s moving in and now I have no egress if my other neighbor starts a fire.

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?

>That is an extremely specific situation!

It’s an example. Can you generalize it or should I?

Here's a hypothetical for a two-stairwell building: two couches.

We can avoid this dangerous scenario with a three-stairwell minimum requirement.

Good point. Why do we even bother with two-lane roads and a double yellow line? Such a waste of space. Very contrived to presume there is always a car coming the other way

Sorry, but the only thing that will change my mind is a significantly casualty different between single stairwell and dual-stairwell buildings accounting for building age, construction type, property value, and occupant demographics.

Happy to hear evidence-based arguments.

The US would certainly be a nicer place to live if there were more roads with just one lane, like many older cities and suburbs already have.

You're comparing a situation that happens all the time (opposing traffic) with one that happens extremely rarely (blocked stairwell in a fire). If anything, you're strengthening my point.

We should design for situations to a level that is appopriate given their frequency and severity. Show me evidence that MANDATING the extra stairwell justifies the huge increase in national housing cost, and I'll concede.

Why would you need two lanes in each direction, except perhaps on a highway..? I agree, such a waste of space.

I just dont think it would really help that often. It is not the stairwells that are burning, it is some appartment on a floor below. Your problem is going to be smoke and visibility, not some couch blocking the stair. If those stairs are connected, you will most likely have smoke everywhere and will have no clue if one stair is safer than the other.

> How is double stair MFH overzealous?

I suggest reading the article, which is intended to answer this question in depth. It provides concrete examples!

As a safety measure, it doesn’t, unless I missed something. In fact it says there has been barely any analysis

The couch goes in the elevator, not the stairwell.

Check out this video, which argues against double stair MFH - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM.

We should require two stairs for single family housing as well.

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.

>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.

I agree. That was an attempt at reductio ad absurdum.

That doesnt help you because another neighbor is moving out and blocking the second staircase with another couch. This is the reason why you should have three staircases and only two neighbors. Though a problem arises if a neighbor is able to block a staircase and start a fire at the same time. That has to be checked beforehand.

Yet people keep flocking to them dreadful single-family-home-majority cities, happy to pay rent and all.

I don't know anyone starting a family happy with the situation. Most people I know are moving to suburbs only because they can't get 3 bedroom apartments in cities. If MFH's became broadly available I think many new families would flock there.

Everyone I spoke to who has lived with kids in both flats and houses on 600sqm blocks prefers the latter, commute (which commute?) be damned.

I'll guess this is people who can afford a big stand-alone house in a nice area

Or Those who want to know their kids are safe and have a place to play.

Not much use wanting to have a stand-alone place if you can't afford it.

Rural homes are dirt cheap almost everywhere. Yes, choices are made.

> Burdensome regulations on housing construction have caused costs to skyrocket.

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.

> Also, which regulations?

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.

Cities have seen plenty of high-end housing built (afaik), and yet there is still a lack of affordable housing.

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.

You are mistaken, modern housing construction in major cities is far below historical numbers

I've seen plenty of high-end apartments and condos, etc., but that's a small market and therefore low overall quantity.

> Cities have seen plenty of high-end housing built (afaik), and yet there is still a lack of affordable housing.

They permit office space for more workers than bedrooms. A big clue: pandemic aside, commutes get longer every year.

> 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.

I see you're versed in the left-NIMBY lingo. No, 'trickle down economics' was an excuse for the wealthy to pay lower taxes. When fancy new housing is built, the property taxes are higher.

> Making expensive cars wouldn't seem to result in many more affordable ones.

I think you're intentionally missing the point. The price came down when more cars could be manufactured.

Err, I just enumerated many regulations I have a problem with in the very post you quoted, and evidence is pretty strong that it's the combined effect of all of those regulations that results in higher costs. [1] I realized I left off overuse of exclusively single-family zoning, which is the worst offender. [2]

> 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...

A lot of these zoning changes lower the already low barrier for multinationals to build, but does nothing for actual families. I'm presently surrounded by hundreds of empty units priced out of reach because these companies are illegally colluding to fix the price. They may claim ignorance and try to launder responsibility through a series of tech products, but at the end of the day the rent is high where I am because of price fixing.

Sorry I don't understand - why would they be selling units, but also deliberately pricing them too high?

To get more money? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing

But they're standing empty. If they're empty, they're not getting any money.

They're maximizing revenue by operating at a lower quantity and higher cost. This is microeconomics 101. People get driven out of urban areas where there are good paying jobs. In an ideal market this should be undercut by competition. In reality all available housing in urban areas are owned by large corporations all using the same price-setting backend. This is an illegal trust supercharged by the internet and globalization. It's an international Pottersville rapidly sprung from nowhere. So no, big corporations don't need more government handouts to do more of the same. Incentives for not-profit-driven entities (such as humans seeking secure housing) should be given.

https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-f...

It has to do with the company's balance sheet - their list of assets which they use to borrow money.

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.

It would be surprising if they can just not sell things because they're too expensive, and then borrow based on that too expensive price. Why not just have a single one and price it at $1bn?

Looking from the outside I would guess this is one of the big reasons for the "missing middle" [1] (lack of medium-density housing) in most North American cities. It is simply not economically feasible to build a small to medium size multi-unit building if you need to include two stairwells, so all buildings are either single family houses or huge mega projects.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing

The reason five over ones are popular in the US has nothing to do with staircase requirements. The reason is money, like always.

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.

> The reason five over ones are popular in the US has nothing to do with staircase requirements. The reason is money, like always.

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)

Stairs are not expensivei they take space, but are cheay otherwise

Space ain't free.

In most cities space is the expensive thing

By the time you've complied with all current codes, stairs themselves do take up an unreasonable amount of floor space.

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.

At least in larger construction, it's the pathway to the secondary stair that takes up an exorbitant amount of space, hamstrings the layout. Also, code compliant fire egress stairwells are surprisingly expensive to build, costs more than the unit cost of a living space.

It’s true that five stories is an economic sweet spot, but the idea is we could get five story point access blocks instead of double loaded corridor layouts.

“maximize the available land”

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. Especially since a big problem for Western cities is not "how do I build new megalopoli" but "how do I fill in density without acquiring a whole city block of houses in one go". For a single-stair walk-up you don't need a massive amount of property, you can plonk a pretty danged nice mid-rise building on the same acreage as one large detached house.

With a single stair you can also get windows in opposite ends of the building for the same unit which makes a huge quality of life difference. Getting a real cross-breeze!

The two stairways result in double-loaded hallways which also negatively impact unit sizes and make it impossible to have windows on more than one wall in most rooms. It's a total disaster

The fire escape can count as a separate staircase too and it can go over windows.

It's crazy to me that people are arguing against two stair houses when I have a ladder in my single family home in case of a fire that blocks the stairs.

Fire in the only stairwell or a collapse, guess you just die or hope the fire department saves you before you suffocate.

If only there was an article addressing exactly your concern!

The article doesn't address this at all. There's only a passing mention of external fire escapes but no argument at all about alternative means of escaping a building in the absence of a the primary one becoming unavailable.

The article claims that you don't need one because of the safety that comes from modern fireproofing in construction.

No elevator would be a no-no here. What if you were in a wheelchair?

Then find a place with an elevator. Not every home needs to be for everyone

But that is not what the law says. :/

Three-story walk-ups are common and legal in America, if that is where "Here" is for you. If you are in a wheelchair, you rent a ground floor unit.

Only if built before the ADA.

I'd like to see more discussion of the safety impact; 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. (Wood construction is generally a good thing from a sustainability perspective)

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.

A few cities (with wood framed construction) in NA have allowed this for decades with no apparent issues

The intention of the double stairwell requirement, is that you are not supposed to have your access point to the stairwell by an obstruction, and there should be a maximum access time to the stairwell.

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.

also fire suppression system (sprinklers) and pressurized stairwells are mandated.

And fireproof walls between units. It takes a long time for a fire to penetrate two layers of drywall.

The "Well there's your problem" podcast did an episode on 'five over ones' (five stories of wood over one concrete) and touched on this - IIRC they were most likely to burn down during construction when the fire suppression wasn't installed and active yet.

They also did a more in-depth episode on Grenfell, which touched on a lot of the same issues, except Grenfell was (a) taller and (b) occupied.

I can heartily recommend that episode if you like a podcast to a) be respectful to the victims and b) clown on the people who caused it.

> 1. the height is generally determined by the height of the fire ladders available, providing a second means of egress

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.

Ground fire ladders are about 35’ max. Aerial apparatus (trucks/quints) around the US are normally around 80-110 feet in length.

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.

A lot of the requirements make sense in bigger buildings. It's not easy to evacuate a large office building taking up a city block using only ladders. And some of it is reactive; for example, there is a distance separation requirement for stairwells, because during 9/11 the three North Tower stairwells were only 70 feet apart and enclosed only with gypsum, so they were all severed on impact, dooming the people above the impact zone. But none of this is really relevant for a building with six floors and 24 units total.

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.

Even Singapore has lots of those middle sized buildings missing from the US.

I think in Japanese apartment buildings they’re all required to have their own rope ladder? Since you go from balcony to balcony they don’t even have to be very long.

There's no rope ladder in my apartment here. I've never heard of such a thing.

Fire escapes are still a thing, right??

Fire escapes haven't been a thing in a long, long time. Not in new construction.

Older buildings only.

I guess I've lived in old, old buildings :/

They have their charm!

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...

Given the size distribution of Americans these days, I wonder if many could even climb out to use the fire escapes?

Specifically, they were banned in 1968 in New York City.

Grenfell is what happens when building regulations are poorly enforced.

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.

Which is why the article's call for "reform of defect liability laws that drive insurance costs up for condo developers" makes his whole position deeply suspicious.

Exactly. If modern day advances make single-stair multifamily homes perfectly safe than there's zero reason to give condo developers a free pass for designs that are found to have led to families burning death.

Europe is a lot more sophisticated about both regulation and multi-family housing then we are, I’m not sure we should interpret North America’s quirks as advances.

If they are advances, we might ask to what end: most building and planning code was created with the express purpose of engineering a suburban single-family detached homeowner-driver society, not to create safe or pleasant urbanism.

Keep in mind that Grenfell was the responsibility of the local council. It was not run by eg a multinational corporation, which usually have better management and a commercial reputation to defend (and deep pockets to go after in a law suit).

Big business gets a lot of flak, but they are honestly better on average than small businesses and many local governments institutions.

Unregulated | poorly enforced "big business" is no better and arguably worse.

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.

If you do that siloing, you don't benefit from reputation, yes.

It wasn't a question.

If BigWellKnownCompany uses TLASubsidiary (Delaware) LLC to handle contracts then they are still BigWellKnownCompany with reputation and in the event of litagation the buck (generally) stops with the bankrupcy of TLASubsidiary (Delaware) LLC.

There are exceptions (see, for example, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) and it's failure to shield behind LTL Management) but it works in the real world often enough to be Standard Operating Procedure.

Yes, reputation and legal liability are two different things.

Either the subsidiary shares in the reputation, but then also passes on damages to the reputation. Or it ain't.

The same is true for legal liability: if the parent company is legally liable for the subsidiaries debts, then the subsidiary can (all else being equal) borrow cheaper. If that chain is severed, the subsidiary borrows only as cheaply as a stand-alone small company, or perhaps even worse, because severing that liability also serves as a signal to potential creditors to better watch out for shenanigans.

With a clever enough PR department (respectively legal department), you can try to have it both ways. But a sufficiently clever PR department can do anything.

Unfortunately people from the US (including those who have never lived in an apartment or thought about fire regulations before) instinctively get really worried about this whole idea and assume people are just going to get killed.

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".

I totally agree with you that it's definitely instinctive. The article has a link to mass timber construction for fire officials. Coincidentally there is an office building near me with mass timber structure but whenever I tell people about it, they instinctively think of it as less safe than steel and concrete.

Having lived in both places - Italy and the US - I think it's a natural question.

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.

You could just add that as an option to the housing regulation:

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.

Concrete is probably not a great thing in much of the US for lower-rise buildings. Definitely not here in Oregon. And the fire suppression stuff is mandatory in multifamily housing anyway.

Why is concrete bad in Oregon? Autoclaved, aerated concrete is common in Germany which has a slightly harsher version of our Oregon climate.

It outputs a lot of CO2, and there are a lot of trees to construct low-rise apartments with.

Earthquakes

Allowing non-wooden construction (and then a different fire safety regime for it) is not the same as mandating it.

Developers in Oregon would presumably stick to wood, then. No harm done.

I think there is some of that certainly, but it's also worth being cautious anytime a developer says they want to abandon fire codes that were put in place to save human lives so that they can add greater density housing. Fire codes got where they are in part because developers were fine with packing people into unsafe housing situations. Let's not let our guard down entirely now.

>that were put in place to save human lives

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.

I think it's a much bigger assumption that the fire code which requires people have somewhere to escape to when a stairwell is on fire was put in place to make it difficult to build instead of for helping to keep families from burning alive.

I fully agree that if after careful and thorough examination it's determined that the codes are outdated and can be removed without endangering people that they should be, even if it didn't make it easier for developers.

More likely the code is amended and not removed. Two stairs OR better fire suppression/resistance.

>I think it's a much bigger assumption...

i don't think it's that big of an assumption. there's a long history of discrimination being enforced through building codes. will a second stairwell save a life at some point? almost certainly yes, but it wouldn't be an effective blocker if it obviously didn't. the question isn't whether it improves safety, it's whether it improves safety enough to be worthwhile. a second stairwell would also almost certainly save a life if it were required for single-family homes too, but we don't do that because there's some line somewhere where we decide making things 100% safe is silly, and compromise the edge case of safety for the sake of practicality. and there's a lot of forces trying to move that line away from practicality when it comes to multi-family housing.

The difference is that for a single family home people have other ways to get out alive. Someone could easily survive a drop out of a second story window and ropes (or today ladders like this one https://www.homedepot.com/p/Kidde-Fire-Escape-Ladder-2-Story...) make single family homes with only one stairwell pretty safe.

That doesn't work when you're got people trapped in a six-story tenement. International Building Code requires the second stairway only for buildings higher than three stories which seems like a good idea considering that the median height leading to death is about 4 to 5 storeys. (https://thetraumapro.com/2010/01/11/what-you-need-to-know-ab...)

Ah yes I also sometimes think that some people who champion more regulations and safety actually don't want the thing to exist. Like any discussion about traffic management for example. Or every "think of the children!!".

You sound sarcastic, but yeah, people don't always bring up "concerns" in good faith. "Think of the children" is a good example; it's been brought up by people who are against gay marriage, and in reality they just don't want homosexual couples in public.

All safety regulations are written in blood.

Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean the regulation is proper today.

I also have an instinct to avoid standing where I could fall a long way - it's probably a good instinct. You haven't provided evidence that the instinct regarding fire safety in single-stair buildings is flawed.

It's not an instinct, it's a gut reaction to change. The evidence is that people aren't burning to death in Europe.

That comment is the gut reaction. What is the injury rate in Europe with and without single-stair construction? In the US? In buildings with otherwise American-style construction?

The new construction single-staircase building in NYC that I used to live in was metal and concrete framed, fitted with sprinklers throughout, and had double fire doors separating each apartment from the (all tile/metal/concrete) staircase with little vestibules. It didn’t give me pause in the slightest, really I felt like it was safer from a fire perspective than a typical wood frame single family home, or an older building with a rickety old fire escape.

> Wood construction is generally a good thing from a sustainability perspective

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!"

How does that compare to leaving the trees grow, say, 25 more years? You’re only comparing the action of using them in construction.

The density of managed forests would not allow for that much growth across all the trees. Some would get larger, others would stagnate. Better to chop them all and replace with a fresh batch that will all be scrubbing.

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.

> I'd like to see more discussion of the safety impact;

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.

https://youtu.be/MCC7C5PJrOI?si=TAgIKOYbIpr8VAM0&t=154

That's what I'm trying to raise money to do! ;-)

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’m curious: is there room for a middle ground involving non-enclosed fire escapes? How useful are these?

>US housing stock is also much more wooden and therefore at higher risk to begin with.

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.

What are your thoughts on sprinklers in these types of situations? Are they mostly to give people enough time to get out? Do you feel the safety reduction of moving to single stair is offset by requiring sprinkling?

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.

There are many types of fires that can be extinguished by sprinklers but their primary function is to give occupants more time to escape.

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...

> and the other made of stone and steel

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.

I've never been to a European house that has drywall over concrete or brick. The only time I see drywall used there is in finished attic areas to cover slanted roof rafters.

Very common here in Norway, at least. Drywall isn't just to create solid surfaces between structural timber, it also helps dampen sound and provide a flat surface for paint. A poured concrete wall is very rough and would require plastering to get a flat, smooth surface, which is more labor-intensive than just drywalling.

> but it also notes that US housing stock is also much more wooden and therefore at higher risk to begin with. (Wood construction is generally a good thing from a sustainability perspective)

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.

> (Wood construction is generally a good thing from a sustainability perspective)

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.

Wood captures carbon within it and has minimal energy cost compared to steel, glass and brick. Lumber can also be regrown.

So highly sustainable from a global warming perspective at least.

Steel can be recycled. And we are sitting on a giant ball of matter, so making more bricks or glass is easy. (Glass can be recycled, but it's not really worth it.)

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.

> You'd have to run the numbers, it's not obvious to me which effect dominates

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.

> There's not even a tiny amount of opportunity cost being lost by farming timber.

Does that mean you can buy land for 0 dollars per squaremeter in Oregon? Wow.

I can speak to and endorse this kind of unit from personal experience. I was born, raised and lived most of my life in Denver, CO. Now, I live in France in a 'single-stair multifamily'.

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.

> Admittedly, I do miss having barbecues in the backyard. I also miss having a garage to use as a workshop.

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.

I now live in a 4 story building in Spain and I too miss having BBQs.

My partner and I love the "single-stair multifamily" building "Leilighet" that we live in Oslo, Norway. It was built in the 1920s and has 3 levels with each level having 3 units. We enjoy the people that we live near and we really appreciate that our son is able to be around so many people in our immediate community. For the most part, we are always seeing someone that we know when coming and going.

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.

enjoy your 15 minute prison city lol

The province of British Columbia (BC) seems to be considering it:

* https://morehousing.substack.com/p/bc-single-stair

* https://morehousing.substack.com/p/single-stair

See also a related video by About Here:

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"

The evidence the author gives is not compelling.

"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.

Indeed, going by this [0] information from FEMA, it seems like the US is mid-pack.

[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v12i8.pdf

Maybe the biggest problem with regulations is that even if they're very positive when enacted, there is usually no mechanism to reevaluate them during the following decades.

And so the effects of a fire 164 years ago screws up housing across the US today.

> there is usually no mechanism to reevaluate them during the following decades

One of my favorite parts about Texas, at least on paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Advisory_Commission

Re-evaluation is hard, costly, and risky: what if you actually degrade the safety a tiny bit? Or maybe you don't, but an incident happens, and your changes are going to be blamed by media? Doing nothing and groaning is safer for career.

The author does not even attempt to analyze the safety impact of removing the second stair. The only evidence they provide is that Western Europe has fewer fire deaths than the US. Which suggests that perhaps the US should be increasing fire safety standards rather than removing them…

Seattle also allows for single stair multifamily. It hasn't been a problem for us yet.

What is the rate of injuries per fire in single stair multifamily buildings?

European here.

I can't even put to words my embafflement upon having learnt that you US folks need two staircases.

The US has some very interesting requirements when building. In some cities, regardless of destiny, new buildings are required to have 1.x parking spots per unit or something of the sort as well. Which basically assures all buildings have to be designed for car centric life.

It's the same for many European cities and towns. Many cities started to reduce it down to 0.5 parking spaces per flat or less, because many of those parking spaces tend to be empty in bigger cities. And just increase prices for housing.

I was just visiting a European friend for a couple weeks. They have a car but parking was a sufficient drama that they took the Uber equivalent within the city most of the time. Busses but minimal metro.

I honestly don't see the drama in most European cities, it's not like in NYC. Street parking is very limited in bigger cities, so you might need to park in expensive parking garages. Or use other methods of travel.

Only in areas with a lot of old houses (built before cars were a thing) there might be a lack of garages.

Owning/driving a car is generally very expensive in many European countries. Not like in the US where wages are rather high, but cars and gas extremely cheap, because there is no substantial tax on them.

Edit: this might not apply to southern Europe. In some southern European cities it's impossible to go by car. That's why everyone drives a scooter.

This was southern Europe. Looked like mostly street/sidewalk parking as far as I could tell. Certainly lots of cars--not a lot of scooters.

We’ve really done a number to cater to cars and the auto industry in the United States. Some More News does a great job on outlining the history of cars, roads, and what can be done to make things better - https://youtu.be/sayw3TOhykg

The requirement is because if you don't mandate a minimum amount of parking, developers won't create it. Then the neighbors of your fancy new building can no longer find parking near their own home because the new building tenants take it. So they justifiably get angry and start voting in politicians that will enforce minimum capacity for new development.

Your conclusion seems wrong in pratice. Seems in fact quite the opposite happens, more affordable housing, etc. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/...

So the neighbors who where there first also don't have any parking in their buildings? Only the new residents should be required to park thier cars off street? I fail to see how that is justifiable.

How do you think we feel about cookie notices?

Yes, housing and web cookies, equally important for one's life.

There is one solution for the cookie notices that is very seldomly talked about: just don't use any marketing cookies, then you don't need consent from the user :)

Another European here: I think the law is fine. How companies, specially US companies react to it, that is not.

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/

> 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.

That is the less charitable interpretation. In reality a lot of sites that cater primarily to a US audience don't have the willingness or development time to try and comply with European regulations. Barring European visitors neatly solves that.

That ain't us.... kind of. That's the websites deciding to follow the letter of the law (or a spiteful, capitalist interpretation, taking it right to the line) instead of the spirit of the law.

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.

No, that's entirely Europe. The outcome of the legislation was easy for anyone to see. As you say, it was blinkered and short-sighted. And I still have to click 20 popups away on mobile every day.

If only a few websites had the banner, then maybe I'd blame those websites. But when they virtually all do, I blame the law.

Just out of interest, you prefer to have your data harvested and sold?

How about: Don't harvest and sell my data, and don't show me a bunch of popups about exactly what data you can collect on me?

That is of course the ideal, but what, you're just gonna trust them?

I don't trust a popup a single bit more than no popup.

So it's not like I trust anything either way. Get rid of the popups. Any solution needs to be legal and not involve popups.

don't use tracking cookies. so complicated!

Actually the legislation is fine, much better than before. It's the enforcement that's lacking.

I'd say >90% of cookie banners break the law. It's just that enforcement is only slowly catching up. We have already seen a couple of cases and I expect that as soon as there have been more rulings banners will start to dissappear or become much simpler.

What basis do you have for saying they would disappear?

I've never heard anyone suggest that.

(And them becoming "simpler" is irrelevant. As far as unwanted interruptions go, a popup is a popup.)

The year is 3157. Each time you access a new resource on the shared data substrate, you are required to accept something called a "Cookie." You have no idea what they are or why. Your crewmates say it has something to do with the homeworld, but you just shrug and prepare for the hyperspace jump.

Most housing was wood framed and there was tragedy after tragedy from inescapable fires.

Oddly, this is already a solved problem.

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.

NYC stopped building fire escapes a long time ago. There are still tons of them, but all on older buildings.

It certainly would be interesting to see them make a comeback though.

Embafflement? Oh US buildings have that too: fire-proof doors divide those long hallways that connect the staircases.

American here.

I can't even put to words my embafflement upon learning that 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in Europe in 2017.

Fire deaths per 100k in 2019:

US .82

UK .38

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fire-death-rates

you understand that 1/3 of the country lights on fire annually?

That had little to do with stairs, but it was caused by the use of inappropriate combustible materials, which were forbidden for buildings of that height in many countries of continental Europe, but they were allowed in Great Britain were regulations were much more lax.

So that event is strictly specific to UK and not representative for Europe in general.

We (UK) had banned those materials too until the tories decided to unban them because many of them are also property developers.

The materials were also forbidden in the UK, but the enforcement of the regulations was very poor.

(The materials are produced for use on 1-2 storey buildings, which is fine.)

That was due to missing stairs? And there is a difference between skyscrapers and 3-6 story multi-apartment buildings where in the worst case you can even exit fine with fire truck ladders or assisted jumps, but the article says even required for those, which would really feel ridiculous for those kind of buildings here. No need to be salty, we find each other alien on many levels :D

The cause is irrelevant, 72 people died in a building fire in 2017. That didn’t need to happen.

Didn't doubt that, but that tragedy was not the point of the "embafflement"-response to the "embafflement"-statement actually, what was my point, so pointless in total, same as you now calling that out again...

Yes, our insanely burdensome health and safety regulations in the US often baffle the devil-may-care freewheeling folks over in Europe.

I'm often surprised when posters identify themselves as "European" which encompasses such a broad range of cultures, biotypes, and ecosystems that it makes any comparison of the US way vs the European way virtually impossible.

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.

> I'm often surprised when posters identify themselves as "European" which encompasses such a broad range of cultures, biotypes, and ecosystems that it makes any comparison of the US way vs the European way virtually impossible.

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.

> Many people in Europe do indeed identify as European

I'll admit my surprise. US has a lot of variety, still I'd have expected that residents of Anchorage and Manhattan have more more in common than residents of Iceland and Malta.

> We are talking about multi (>4) story, multi family apartment buildings, how are wildfires relevant?

> 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.

> 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.

I think you are underestimating the population densities of US cities. I live in a major city and wildfires have burned homes a few miles from me. Residential areas are vast and fire departments are few. I'm also not sure how you can say few US cities are in earthquake zones - maybe if you squint at the numbers, but most if not all of the west coast, Alaska, and Hawaii are in earthquake zones. That's a pretty large chunk to hand-wave away.

Multifamily are almost never built in fire-prone areas, especially on the west coast.

Regarding identifying as European, this is often in relation to something, and one can identify one selves as many things.

I identify myself as an inhabitant of my city compared to someone from a neighbour city. I identify as European compared to someone from United States. I identify myself as a westerner compared to people with a completely different culture.

Excellent point. I would also concede to the previous commenter, that citizens of different countries in Europe have (in many aspects) larger cultural differences than citizens of different states in the US (and language is a huge factor), but there are still many commonalities as well.

The point was that Europe has all of these but no double staircases.

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.

Of course, as you allude, the US is a large and diverse country too, where those features may or may not apply in a given locality.

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.

> -- Frequency of wildfires. They are not uncommon in my southwest corner, so fire safety is taken very seriously

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.

Because of the European Union there's a lot more of common standards and regulations concerning things like buildings between European Countries than there are between American States.

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.

> I can't even put to words my embafflement

That's because the word is "bafflement."

Why would you choose to write something here with a snarky attitude like that?

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.

Maybe I should say I’m from abroad instead? European seems to trigger something in some folks around here.

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.

> European seems to trigger something in some folks around here.

Nothing personal against you, but we see a fair number of self-described Europeans that are a lovely combination of naive, ignorant, and arrogant. It isn't fair to stereotype, but it takes ongoing effort not to.

> That aside, I fail to see any cultural or other reason

But are you an expert in it? Have you researched it? Are you sure the world would "work just as well" if the safety requirements were removed in the US? Considering things like different building materials, different rates of wildfires near urban areas, etc.?

Maybe instead of declaring yourself baffled as if it's obviously something dumb or backwards because it's not how you do it in Europe (or another place), you should ask why it's different instead, and see if you can learn rather than judge.

Then it wouldn't come across as condescending.

I'm baffled at the phrase "single stair" when what they actually mean is "single staircase". I had to read most of that article to work out what it actually meant, while at the same time imagining buildings with only one stair.

Us Americans are very wide.

The second staircase is for the oversized pickup truck.

(And anyway the dual staircase thing isn’t even universal in the US).

It's even worse in Canada.

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.

Second staircases are pretty good. I think most people should have them if they can afford them.

Mostly OT, but related to emergency staircases.

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...

>(for whatever reason we seem to attract fire alarms while on family holidays)

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"?

>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."

The Boston triple decker should be the standard home of North America and nobody can tell me otherwise.

Can you explain this for the non-US audience?

Or just the non-Boston audience

https://www.google.com/search?q=Boston+triple+decker&client=...

Cheap enough for a middle income family to build or purchase themselves, enough apartments for grandparents, parents and children just getting their start in the world. They're great!

I suspect they're referring to this type of buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-decker_(house)

Yep, that's what tons of houses outside of the immediate city center of Boston look like.

Those look a little like the Mansion Blocks we have in London - https://welcomehome-london.com/architecture/mansion-blocks/

A little trolling going on in that Wikipedia page. It captions the Cambridge photo as "Three-decker", where locals would call it a triple-decker. It then captions the Worcester photo as "triple-decker", where locals would call it three-decker.

The issue with regard to single stair buildings are for things taller than 3 stories. IIRC in America 3 stories is the most common limit by far, and in Canada it's even worse with most regulations having 2 stories as the limit for a single stair complex.

We need two exits in Canada. Because a snow drift can easily block one exit. That's why there are exits on each side of a structure, not two, on the same side.

There was a so-so movie based on this one exit theme once. Forget where it was set.

Two exits do not require two stairwells - in any case, this is a very weak argument for denying people the ability to buy housing. Especially in Canada, where there is an absurdly large housing crisis due to an extremely small supply.

Boston and immediate environs is still pretty expensive but, at least historically, these sort of multi-unit houses tended to be in less expensive neighborhoods (many of which are now pretty expensive).

It is generally understood that at 4 floors you need an elevator which is expensive. This is partially the ADA (which doesn't say this from what I can tell, but is generally understood to suggest it), and partially 4 floor is enough stairs few people would agree to walk up them.

Which ties into a second problem: the US especially requires elevators to be too large, which limits how many are built because they take up so much square footage, which drives up the cost to install.

In Spain and France you’ll find single staircase, 4 story buildings that have one meter-by-meter sized elevator. Often even as retrofits in older buildings! In NY you’ll find these too, but they’re only in pre-war (1930s and older) buildings. It would make many apartments much more accessible and desirable to live in if we could drive down the cost of elevator installations for smaller buildings.

The word you’re looking for is “cheaper,” not “accessible.” Those 1x1m elevators certainly aren’t accessible for wheelchair users. ADA requirements require the following minimum dimensions for an elevator:

“The width of the elevator car is a minimum of 80 inches (2030 mm). The depth of the elevator car measured from the back wall to the elevator door is a minimum of 54 inches (1370 mm). The depth of the elevator car measured from the back wall to the control panel is a minimum of 51 inches (1291 mm).”

More accessible. People with walkers can access the apartment, as can people in smaller wheelchairs, if there is a small elevator. In NYC plenty of older people live in pre-war buildings with tiny elevators. Few live in third floor walk up apartments.

My point is exactly that the ADA, in this case, lets the perfect (fully accessible elevator) result in worse outcomes (brand new apartments in 3-5 story buildings require walking up stairs). This is especially harmful in cities where many homes are on small, 12-20 ft wide lots.

As an example I know people who had to move out of their home when they tore their ACL, whereas with a small elevator they would not need to. To be clear I think we need many many more ADA-accessible apartments, but wherever you are allowed to not have an elevator at all, you should also be allowed to have a small 1-2 person elevator in addition to the stairs.

100% agree. Somerville (city outside of Boston) is 19th on this list of densest cities in the US and I attribute it mostly to 2 and 3-family homes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Many of the new town houses in Orange County/Irvine area are following this plan.

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.

boston triple deckers are not sliced vertically

The triple-decker three family is great in that there are windows on four sides and stairs in front and back.

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...

I've been hoping that this would change because the type of mid/low-rise multifamily housing we have in the United States is horrible. What I really hope happens is that ownership of multifamily real estate becomes much more fragmented.

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.

What a wonderful article.

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!

> But when architects try to design apartments with two or more bedrooms, the apartments balloon in size, since every 10-foot-wide bedroom ends up coming with 30 or more feet in unit depth. Try to add a single 120-square foot bedroom and you’ll end up having to add another 180 square feet on top that you need to fill some other way—probably with walk-in closets and en-suite bathrooms, adding the expense of more plumbing, fixtures, and tiles.

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?)

>absolutely true, within the constraints

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.

I worked on a design (only as a hobby) for a group of units in a pentagon or hexagon shape that would surround a central room. The landlord can quickly sheetrock over some doors while cutting others open. The idea is to be able to expand or contract units to accommodate different tennants.

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.

Do you have any pictures of your design that you can share? It sounds cool.

I knew this was coming.

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.

> I knew this was coming.

> 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"?

Please see my use of the words “our” and “we”.

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.

Conservationist "hippie" environmentalism is very different from, and in many ways the opposite of, modern climate activism. A general concern for the environment is roughly the only thing they share in common.

> progressives to jettison anti-sprawl initiatives and environmental reviews.

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.

I don't know if you'd consider him "progressive" enough, but President Biden is trumpeting National Environmental Policy Act reforms.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/news-updates/2023/07/28/biden...

This is talking about energy projects, but I don't see any aspect of jettisoning environmental review. Its about making it more effective and faster, which certainly doesn't mean weakening.

In many cities, the second staircase is used as an amenity.

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.

Yeah, there's also a large collection of existing stock that does this as multi-family construction with a back porch:

https://chicagoreader.com/best-of-chicago/business-in-the-fr...

>Most of those flats have large balconies on the back... with a staircase.

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.

I mean, yes, legally, it's a fire escape. But, there's a full size door leading out to it, it's typically made of treated wood, and the staircase is a normal wood staircase, not some rickety metal thing.

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.

In Japan it seems like some buildings use those as primary stair cases. They have elevators also, but too many people need to use them to be very useful, so its up and down the outside fire escape.

Is the stairwell you’re talking about fully enclosed? If not, then I don’t think it counts.

Per the article, the latest IBC codes seem to say each stairwell must be fully protected/enclosed and the old external ones are insufficient. I used to live in a building with something similar and if yours is like mine then I doubt it meets the latest 2nd stairwell requirements.

(Which is a shame since I agree those backyard stairwells are lovely, and landlords will be even less likely to build them if they have to build 2 internal ones already. Of course if those stairwells increase property value/rent revenue, then that could incentivize them anyway)

I’m curious whether this is really the issue in most US cities. In Chicago we achieve significant density with a two staircase requirement. If the goal is to unlock greater density in Manhattan I accept that single-stair multifamily may be necessary. However, it seems to me that the greater need is to bring more density to urban areas such as Houston, Dallas and Phoenix. All of which seem to have ample opportunity for increasing density in a manner that preserves multiple egress options.

New york has air rights. Many existing buildings cannot build taller, thus redevelopment removes leasable space instead of modernizing and/or bifurcating it.

We just need to make builders more liable for issues caused by their own building.

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.

The builder doesn’t design a building, they’re given a set of engineered plans and told to build it.

If it meets code and passes inspection, why are design problems the builder’s fault? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.

I guess I should clarify often in the US the "builder" and "designer" are the same entity. By "builder" I mean the people responsible for designing unsafe designs, and the people responsible for poorly executing good designs.

Find root cause, and make that entity liable

There are construction defect laws in California which, infamously, only apply to multi-family buildings and exempt single-family homes. There's a 10-year window after certification of occupancy where the builder is liable for any construction defects, not just those that may lead to death of occupants. In practice it's mostly cosmetic/finishing issues that people complain and file lawsuits about. Leveling the playing field here would be nice.

Unfortunately this is unlikely to work, so long as limited liability companies exist.

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.

It would seem sensible if fire codes were something like LEED certifications, where different elements scored different points toward certification. Example: You don't need a second staircase if you have a sprinkler system. Non-flammable materials like brick and stone earn more points that wood and asphalt. etc.

Fire codes aren't a point system, but they do often have "X is required if Y is missing" type rules.

Hi, architect here. I have a lot to say about the issue, but I'll just start with a comment that the place with the highest rate of fires in residences and deaths from these per capita is Mississippi, which has one of the lowest rates of people living in multifamily buildings. In addition to the rural nature of the state, and prevalence of non-professional fire departments in these areas (these two items moot to this discussion), a simple version of the biggest contributors to this outcome are: the housing stock here starts out as poor quality - there are a lot of mobile homes, which have a separate, less restrictive and more dangerous building code. Plus the lack of skilled labor leads to worse initial quality over the entire built sector. The other major factor is lax or nonexistent enforcement of existing building codes and housing regulations. So already poor housing degrades quickly and badly. A relatively wealthy small town I'm familiar with went two years without a Building Code enforcement official.

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!"

There's point about the whole fire risk that has been missed so far: Denser settlements allow fire fighters to repsond and arriver faster and the chance for a neighbour to spot the fire in a house is much higher if there are more neighbours.

That article gave an example of a "typical European floorplan". It did have multiple stairs they were just not normally accessible from all apartments. If you had some emergency-only provision to enter your neighbor's apartment and then bust their wall to access the apartment behind it, more than one egress would be possible. Some emergency doors where an alarm would sound perhaps? I come up with all kinds of problems with this, but that was my thoughts looking at that floorplan.

Part of the fire safety of the European design will be containment: firewalls between the apartments, which would be compromised by emergency doors.

There's logic, and there's what is politically feasible.

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.

> The common hallway that must connect the two stairs in a modern American code-compliant building cuts the structure in two, cutting off the possibility of floor-through apartments found in traditional American multifamily architecture like the New York City tenement or the Los Angeles dingbat.

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.

> What requires a common hallway?

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.

Even as a compromise you could make a pretty good small building with 2 units per floor, single walk-up stairwell+landing+elevator on the front, and an exterior fire-escape on the back.

This is a super common setup in my part of NYC (minus the elevator). It seems to work fairly well, especially since it makes it viable to have lots of buildings in a row with minimal wasted space between them.

It's definitely not the densest design possible, but it certainly seemed to let them fit a lot of fairly spacious 1-2 BRs in not a lot of space back in the early 20th c., and the height can scale up pretty well (though the elevator probably becomes at least a soft requirement above 4-5 floors).

I'm thinking more of a 10-floor building because I stayed in one with family in Buenos Aires that was like that several times.

The single-stair plan shown [1] isn't really single stair. It's three stairs, one per pair of units (per floor). If multifamily requires two means of egress, you'd need to add three more stairs, which takes up a lot of footprint. It would be easier to delete one stairway and add a hallway; but then only the two end units can address both the front and back of the building.

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...

I know I'm going to get a lot of pushback for raising this point, but I'm somewhat incredulous to see people bring up safety as the reason for these restrictions, when this country simultaneously (in many places) allows young adults to buy a gun (or lots of guns!) simply by walking into a store and asking for one. But heaven help you if you want to build a three story building with one stairway.

Nice another uneducated take that shows no understanding of the firearms buying process.

In the great state of Texas, as I understand the process:

-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?

Little bit different than “ simply by walking into a store and asking for one” no?

Almost like anti-gun people are purposely disingenuous when they state stuff like this and ignore the background check.

Aside from getting rid of unnecessary regulation, letting everyone who can work remotely to do so is a great way to bring down house prices in most in-demand areas.

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.

An excellent video was recently published on this topic, although it focuses laregly on Vancouver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM

Why is this debate being simplified to "single-stair vs double-stair"? I am not seeing anyone even attempt to pitch a return to single-stair plus fire-escape, which seems odd.

Exterior exit stairs are still allowed by the International Building Code, but as mentioned in the article they aren't going to be too similar to the classic fire escape stair particularly if there are accessible units because a second egress has to be accessible too.

I don't see why fire escapes aren't the better answer here.

I believe the new codes require the stairway to be enclosed

It feels ridiculous that a huge country with so much good land and widely spread cities, has problems like this. Just nix zoning guys. You have infinite land to build on.

Enclosed stairways are the default in a lot of countries. I prefer having a single enclosed stairway with fire-doors than multiple stairways.

Why not get rid of all fire safety protections? We can really get moving then. The ADA is pretty onerous, if we just ignore that we can have it up in half the time! I don't REALLY need all that electrical grounding in my house, all that extra copper adds up you know, think of how many more houses we could build without it?

As the article argues, at length, the "most of the USA" with this requirement does worse than NYC which does not have it, and significantly worse than Europe which does not have it but even more.

When I look closer, the newer the building the better it tends to do in general. And as the article itself points out, Europe doesn't use nearly as much wood which changes things (not always for the good - Europe tends to have terrible insulation and their construction materials are not helping - though newer buildings do well here)

European houses in climates where it matters have better insulation that American houses.

You can check it's true by looking at the energy use per capita.

> When I look closer, the newer the building the better it tends to do in general.

Which should be in favour of the US, which has much younger housing stock. So likely the statistics are even worse (from a US standpoint) if we consider building age.

>And as the article itself points out, Europe doesn't use nearly as much wood which changes things

Actually many new large buildings in Germany, Scandinavia... are build using timber constructions.

>(not always for the good - Europe tends to have terrible insulation and their construction materials are not helping - though newer buildings do well here)

You are joking right? When was the last time you have been to a northern European building? From my experience they tend to be much better insulated than most US houses (likely also because energy/heating costs tend to be higher). The passive house standards originated in Germany.

a passive house in germany would not even meet the minimun requirments for Minnesota where it wouldn'd be passive. Climate matters.

Sure climate matters, however your assertion seems to be incorrect.

> Almost all Passivhauses rely on: very heavy insulation, R-40 to R-60 walls, R-50 to R-90 roofs, and often R-30 to 50 sub-slab insulation, triple-glazed low-e windows, and exceptional avoidance of thermal bridges (except for wood framing) ...

from [1]

While Minnesota requires significantly less insulation:

> Wood frame wall insulation: R-20 or 13+5 (CZ6), R-21 (CZ7) Foundation or crawl space insulation: R-15 insulation for concrete masonry foundations and R-10 applied to the exterior of the wall; R-10 continuous insulation is allowed on the exterior of the foundation wall if the air leakage rate is below 2.6 ACH50 Duct insulation: Depending on the location, R-3.3 to R-8 and vapor or weather retarder might be required from [2]

To compare to a much more comparable climate. In Sweden the U-value (metric units) of a window must be better than 1 W/m^2K, Minnesota building standard requires a U-factor (imperial) of better than 0.32 Btu/h·ft2·F which corresponds to a U-value (metric units) of 1.82 W/m^2K. Note lower is better, so for a similar climate the European code requires almost twice as good windows.

[1] https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-025-the-p...

[2] https://www.tradesmance.com/career-central/minnesota-insulat...

To be fair, crisis is when you suspend existing laws so you can move fast and break stuff.

See: martial law as a legal precedent.

If you can't prove that the regulations actually do anything (like looking at the frequency/severity/cause of casualties in other places that don't have any such regulations) then...

yes?

Why have regulations if they are enormously expensive and don't actually do anything for safety?

I see these things in movies, sometimes the last part is a ladder?

Why isn't it one big ladder?

I imagine time to get down it is a factor

Land Value Tax being the main method of taxation would encourage municipalities to adopt things like this.

I have yet to understand why people have made land value tax a thing.

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?

The classic example is the lot that sits empty or has a parking structure on it in Manhattan. Today, you pay very little tax on the empty land or parking lot because you’re taxed on that total value of the land and improvements. This discourages building stuff sometimes. With land value tax, you’d be taxed on what someone would pay you for that land with improvements similar to surrounding, so it’s advantageous to build something there instead of nothing, since you’re paying the same tax as the sky scraper next door.

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.

So if the most valuable use is luxury apartments and stores that would be what everything needs to converge to? Feels like a tax always looking towards the most valuable use could actually be very regressive and push anything but the richest out of economically attractive cities. Maybe I am missing something?

I mean, it might be that there’s an empty lot outside your own home that could use some houses built on it but no one does because it’s easier to pay a pittance for taxes and leave it sit until it’s worth more. There are many cases where land could be put to better use but it’s not. A few people might get priced out of an area, but they’ll be able to sell their land and buy something elsewhere easily. The downside is certainly there but I think the upsides outweigh those.

Maybe. I'd like to see something like that run as a simulation over a city to see effects for varying high value uses.

Luxury apartments will depreciate into regular apartments over time. Allowing demand for luxury apartments to be pent up just means that rich people will capture more regular apartments instead.

Why would that happen? Demand will be satisfied as that would be the most high value thing to do, driving the land tax wherever the process starts.

You mean why luxury apartments will become regular apartments? Most of the "luxury" apartments these days aren't really that special besides being newer and trendier. Of course, the truly iconic buildings will always be considered luxurious, but even the above average ones depreciate. In Manhattan, you can see a lot of buildings from a century ago with degraded ornamentation that would have been beautiful in their heyday, but they're actually more affordable than their neighbors that are plainer, but more renovated.

It is clear that ornamentation is not what makes a luxury apartment.

I would say the biggest component of a luxury apartment is the layout. A huge open space is amazing if you want to throw large parties, and can easily use up as much space as 3 studio flats. But the one huge luxury apartment will never realistically degrade into 3 studio flats.

> Today, you pay very little tax on the empty land or parking lot because you’re taxed on that total value of the land and improvements. This discourages building stuff sometimes. With land value tax, you’d be taxed on what someone would pay you for that land with improvements similar to surrounding, so it’s advantageous to build something there instead of nothing, since you’re paying the same tax as the sky scraper next door.

If you're being taxed on hypothetical improvements and not just the value of the land, why is it called a Land Value Tax, rather than a Hypothetical Best Use Tax? People assume the name means what it says and get confused.

I don’t know why they name stuff what they do, but it’s dumb to simply read the name of something and then make assumptions based on no further information about that thing. Maybe you should have read the Wikipedia about it before assuming stuff?

Well, that doesn't really help, because Wikipedia says

> A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it.

In my mind, the value of the land without regard to buildings, etc, is what you would pay for an empty lot. But you said the value is what you would pay for the lot with improvements. Theoretically, real estate property taxes I've paid have been divided into the land value and the improvements value (although it's mostly conjecture; the total value is all that matters and that generally approximates market value of the lot with the improvements, at least in CA and WA, where I've paid property taxes; although CA has Prop 13 that distorts assessments over time). Washington even states the land portion is assessed based on the best use, not the current use, unless it's in some special categories like farm, forestry, and open space.

Now I'm even more confused. Which speaks to the GP's confusion.

> I have yet to understand why people have made land value tax a thing.

If the whole concept is so confusing, starting with the name, it's no wonder advocacy isn't effective.

Not everybody does a half-hour of research before every HN comment. Nor should they be expected to.

LVT was named (I presume) by the advocates of it. If their name is misleading, don't blame the people reading it who are getting confused.

A person can read about it in maybe ten minutes max, and if someone can’t even do half an hour of research, anyways, should they even comment? Do people have the right to a conversation simply because they read the article title yet have not read even at the surface level about that topic?

Well, how much research have you done on the quality of discussion board topics, and how much time people should spend on research before they comment in order to produce the optimum discussion? And yet here you are, commenting on it.

;-), but a serious point: You don't actually live that way. Nobody does.

You're looking at it the wrong way. They're not looking at the hypothetical improvements and charging as if you built them. They're saying "this land could reasonably support a skyscraper, therefore it is very valuable land".

Or the other way to look at it is "This land has lots of valuable community improvements like nearby restaurants, shops, parks, good schools, walkability. Therefore, the land itself is worth more. It is more economically efficient if more people get to benefit from the positive externalities of a good location, and so we should incentivize development in the locations that are most valuable."

Most areas can support a skyscraper, but it doesn't really make sense to build one in the middle of nowhere. Conversely it doesn't make sense to keep prime real estate next to shops & public transit a surface parking lot. LVT incentivizes developing the parcels that are in good locations into high-density, high-value uses. A traditional improvement-based property tax reverses those incentives: if you develop your parking lot into a skyscraper, you pay much more in taxes, which may be unaffordable for smaller non-corporate owners, which gives them an incentive to hold onto them and keep them as marginal low-productivity uses.

On the other hand, I would say, "this land has very high taxes compared to its price; therefore it's not very valuable land."

If you implement a land value tax, as I understand it, the parking lot and the skyscraper next to it should be taxed the same if they have the same footprint. All things being equal, that means a very large tax burden for the parking lot owner, and that certainly is an incentive to transfer it to someone who will do something with it, which is what you're advocating for.

But at the same time, it makes the price you can get for the parking lot much lower. And I'm having a hard time not equating sales price and value. And once I've seen that under a LVT, the parking lot has no or little value, because it can't be sold for much money, it's more confusing --- if the value is low, and the tax rate is based on value, why are the taxes so high?

> But at the same time, it makes the price you can get for the parking lot much lower.

Lower than what? The price it would have had without a tax? Sure, but the same applies to the lot with the skyscraper. Increased land taxes will push down land prices, whether it's a land value tax or not. That doesn't seem like a fundamental issue with the idea.

> And once I've seen that under a LVT, the parking lot has no or little value, because it can't be sold for much money

Why can't it?

It's always possible to set taxes so high on an item that it's worthless, but I don't think that's inherently part of the LVT proposition.

I'm assuming that a LVT replaces property tax. And that a skyscraper's property tax divided over the nearby footprint is pretty high.

I think that's reasonable.

If LVT doesn't replace property tax, well we already have land value as a component of property tax; I'm assessed for land value and improvements value.

If property tax on a skyscraper isn't very high, then the whole discussion is kind of moot.

I can't tell which questions that's supposed to answer so I'll try to restate my argument in terms of what you just said:

Yes I agree it will make the property taxes go up.

But the decrease in price specifically because of increased taxes is not a problem, at least if we assume they don't go up so much that the price becomes almost zero. And when talking about whether LVT is viable in theory, we should go ahead and assume it.

That's a classic example used by proponents of LVT. But what is another example?

Terry buys a house in a run down, blighted, poor/cheap neighborhood, and along with other neighbors, starts to revitalize it. 15 years later, the formerly blighted neighborhood has become hip, due to the work and care Terry and others put in to it. Property prices increase as rich people want to move to the cool neighborhood, and now Terry has a hard time affording the taxes, and is forced to sell and essentially evicted from the neighborhood he helped build, because a rich person would rather live there.

First of all, LVT are designed to be replacement for property taxes, which already have the problem you describe.

Also, Terry isn't forced to sell to a rich person. He is a rich person. The type of people who like to live in hip neighborhoods tends to be recent graduates starting their high paying career. While they may have more income than Terry, Terry is significantly wealthier than most of them. If he really wants to stay on there, he can easily pay off any property/land taxes with the equity of his home.

They have that problem, but there are frequently programs or legislation designed to reduce that burden. Eg, >10% of Americans are (theoretically) covered by Prop 13. Other municipalities may have laws on the books limiting property tax increases to a certain percent per year. Many other places offer property tax relief programs for people with low income, or the disabled, or the elderly, or generally by increasing exemptions.

As I understand it though, you wouldn't want these programs with a LVT system, because they would just distort the market in a similar manner that it is now?

Yes, because of the property appreciation, Terry can say that on paper, he is rich-ish, but a weird kind of rich where he has nothing but a house in a nice neighborhood, and otherwise has very little money.

How does he pay off the taxes with the equity of his home? A HELOC could work, but he already can't afford the increased taxes with his income alone, so a HELOC would just delay the inevitable and based on his income he probably wouldn't qualify for one.

Or he could do a reverse mortgage, be able to pay the taxes, but put himself at a major risk of losing his home entirely if he lives long enough. Also, reverse mortgages are only available to people over 62.

The only cases I see LVT being seriously considered is alongside further tax and welfare reform, so that regular people have their burden decreased by the increased taxes from those cases where land is not being used efficiently today. So you’d have a basic income, public health insurance, zoning reform, and laws protecting private residential uses of land. You can’t just fix one issue alone here, it comes with a host of economic and financial reforms.

Also, it does have possible downsides compared to today, like your single family home might not be there in a hundred or fifty years when the area needs more density. That’s okay to me, I think humans need to understand land use changes over time and you’re not always going to have a big family home last hundred of years under more reasonable land use laws.

1. That still happens with the classic property tax, but 2. at least there's more housing supply / less empty lots with LVT.

Well, one system taxes land value and improvement and the other taxes only land value. In the first system, all improvements have a tax cost of x * value(improvement). In the second system, they have a tax cost of 0. There's three possible outcomes: this increases improvements, this keeps them the same, and this decreases improvements. It depends on whether you think moving one cost component from positive to zero puts us in the first, the second, or the third worlds there.

I just tried it out and ChatGPT helps if you want to understand this. It is quite patient and will provide instant responses.

Someone buys a property:

    +-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
    |    Type     | Land Value | Cover Value | Total Value |
    +-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
    | Parking Lot |        100 |           0 |         100 |
    | Dump        |        100 |         -20 |          80 |
    | Skyscrapper |        100 |         100 |         200 |
    +-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+

Land increases in price and buyer sells it:

    +-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
    |    Type     | Land Value | Cover Value | Total Value |
    +-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
    | Parking Lot |        150 |           0 |         150 |
    | Dump        |        150 |         -20 |         130 |
    | Skyscrapper |        150 |         100 |         250 |
    +-------------+------------+-------------+-------------+

In all 3 cases there's a profit of 50, but dump payed the least taxes followed by parking lot and then skyscrapper. In places where land increases in value it incentives to hold the land while NOT developing it.

When money is growing on trees, pick it.

If you have an undeveloped piece of land worth X, and it becomes worth Y if you put a skyscraper on it, then you do it as long as the cost of construction is less than Y-X.

Sure, you can make money by doing nothing, if the price of land is going up. But you can make that money plus the money you make by building the skyscraper by, you know, building the skyscraper.

If you're not willing to do that because of the increased taxes on the skyscraper, then either you're refusing dollars to avoid spending a dime, or the tax regime in your city is really out of control.

So I'm not buying your argument here at all. Developers develop because they make money doing it. The absence of a land-value tax isn't what stops them.

> Developers develop because they make money doing it

Not all property is owned by developers. I would go even further and say that most properties are owned by non-developers.

Some people use land as store of value. We as a society would be better off if they used, e.g. gold instead.

It is the case now that it is profitable to purchase a rundown building, pay the property taxes for years, and then sell it for a significantly higher value.

This is the rent seeking behavior that a Land Value Tax seeks to eliminate. By taxing the unimproved value of land, it becomes more and more burdensome to sit and do nothing with your property. By making improvements (building a high rise, running a productive farm, etc.) you reduce your tax burden and, as you mentioned, profit from the improvements.

So a more productive and efficient land use is encouraged by land value tax compared to property taxes which since they are based on total value (including improvements) you could potentially be punished for being more productive than just doing nothing.

it would increase the tax rate on land to be much higher. In the most extreme case, the annual tax on land value would so high that vacant land could be purchased for close to zero purchase price because the holding cost of the tax is high enough to capture all the value which is capitalized into a purchase price.

Correct, but that's the point really. In an extreme case, such as an empty lot in Manhattan, it would cause the property to change hands to someone who could be more productive with it.

Even though it wouldn't be worth as much without LVT, it would still be worth a lot in such an extreme case, so it's not devastating for the owner either.

Because improvements aren't taxed. So if you add improvements (read: more housing), you don't pay taxes and you become more profitable (more rent, same taxes).

So you move all tax to just the land value at a higher rate than present, then let people build to offset the tax.

It's about incentives. In general, the best incentive scheme is one where people are incentivized to do things that other people find valuable. The worst incentive scheme is one where you get punished by a third party for doing things that others find valuable. Economists call this "deadweight loss", the number of beneficial transactions that do not happen because with the addition of a tax, the transaction is no longer beneficial for both parties. Ideally, the perfect tax is one where you are taxed on things that are negatively valuable for society (an externality or sin tax, as a way of disincentivizing you from doing those activities) or that you don't have control over (i.e. it doesn't alter your behavior at all), while not taxing any activities that are beneficial for others.

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.

Single-stair multifamily: why not. I live in one now (wife, daughter and me) after having spent time in a rural area (detached house in the middle of nowhere).

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.

I spent a little less than a year as a digital nomad living/working for about three weeks at a time in various cities in Italy, France, Austria, and Spain during my twenties. Barcelona's housing was my least favorite and not representative of any other place I stayed. I stayed in those 'superblocks', not near the old city where most tourists stay. It was the most 'American' feeling in terms of its walkability and how impersonal it felt.

Wow very interesting! This is what I come to Hacker News for

multiple streams of people converging on a choke point exit is poor planning in general, but often lethal in the case of fire.

Except there are often fewer people per exit in single-exit designs and the exits are closer to each apartment

Correct. You're just not going to get into a bottleneck situation with ~4-8 people per floor/flight of stairs.

as long as it stays that way, all too often friends, and extended family move in, then thanksgiving and christmas happen

The case for burning up in a fire.

Sounds like a cost savings for those buying up all the real estate in the US and renting it out.

Lower costs for everyone. Including people you don't like. Yes.

>> Lower costs for everyone. Including people you don't like. Yes.

Touche. They are two different contributors to costs, and I wouldn't have commented if I weren't currently frustrated by high housing costs.

I think we've hit peak density already and the rest of the 21st century will be defined by people moving into former farmlands

I think just the opposite, people want more density but outdated views have made it illegal.

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.

Dense, rural towns ftw

Relatively dense small villages are a thing in many places. (And historically probably dominated.) Of course, as they get bigger, you've basically created at least a smaller city. And if they stay small you're going to have to travel to a great number of day-to-day locations like larger stores, medical, etc. that depend on a critical mass to operate.

No mention of the ADA in the entire article - I guess people with mobility issues should go fly a kite.

you can have single-stair with elevators.

Which is the norm in Europe. One stair, one elevator. Even large and long buildings are divided in "stairs": there is central concrete tower with the staircase and the elevator shaft and a number of flats around it. Repeat like a pack of AA batteries. No way to move between them except the basement with parking for the cars.

Elevator regulations are another area where the US needs to improve.

In many areas, the regulation is that if there is an elevator, it must be big enough to hold a stretcher for EMTs. These are of course far more expensive than an elevator large enough to accommodate a wheel chair.

So given the choice between some accessibility and extreme accessibility which is too expensive to provide, the legal choice is to go with zero accessibility.

After a while it becomes clear that the point of most of these regulations is to make multi-unit housing inconvenient and expensive, under the veneer of regulations that, on their face, would improve outcomes.

Recent houses here do have much larger elevators than houses of 50 years ago, which in turn had much larger elevators than older houses. I don't know if they can accommodate a stretcher but they can often fit a bicycle, which can be quite long. 70 cm of wheel diameter plus tires plus the distance between wheels. It could be close to 2 meters. A stretcher is maybe longer if completely extended.

I don't have figures, but my job, but for a multi unit house the extra space is probably not a problem. A typical one could be 10 floors, 4 units per floor. The extra expense for the builder of the house is divided by 40 and the extra space taken from each floor is divided by 4. The maintenance and electricity bills are higher though.

Living in boston with a broken leg certainly made me very proficient in the {carry crutches while hobbling up and down countless staircases using only the railing to lift my entire body up and down with one arm} waddle.

Anyone with anything more debilitating should steer clear.

Although a lot of houses outside of cities require you to go up a flight of stairs. I own a house with a single staircase and the only bathroom is on the second floor. Was on crutches for 6+ months once.

I imagine if one staircase doesn't do the trick, it's unlikely that the second on the other side of the building helps very much.

I'm not understanding how two staircases are more accessible than one. Can you elaborate?

It does mention buildings can be a single stair with an elevator. 2 stairwells vs 1 stairwell doesn't need affect ADA compliance.

It does mean disabled residents are sort of screwed if there's a fire alarm and the elevators are shutoff--as a friend told me recently--unless the neighbors can help. But that's sort of ignored given lack of realistic options.

Isn't that the same situation whether there's a single staircase, staircase + fire escape or two staircases?

Yes. Multi-stories are generally an issue with people with people in the case of fire.

That's a factor of how many units are serviced by a set of stairs. On the same surface area you can have one large building with two staircases and one long corridor that splits the building down the middle, or you can have two separate buildings with a single set of stairs each and a better layout for apartments with more than one bedroom. The peak egress traffic will the the same for each case.

But all of this is unrelated to

> It does mean disabled residents are sort of screwed if there's a fire alarm and the elevators are shutoff--as a friend told me recently--unless the neighbors can help.

If you can't walk down one staircase, and require an elevator no matter what, how are two staircases going to help?

The context was perhaps lost in the thread. Yes, I was talking about having to go up or down a staircase in general. As you say, one or two doesn't really matter.

How exactly do two staircases improve accessibility compared to... one staircase?

The norm in europe is one staircase and one elevator. The elevator is the accessible bit.

> great urban fires by the 19th century were mostly confined to smaller or poorer cities on the continent’s edge that hadn’t yet made the transition to brick, stone, metal, and concrete.

London's Grenfell Towers would like to have a word with you.

I have a great idea how to solve housing shortage in US: ban single family houses inside and near the city borders. Make 25-mile zone where new construction could be multi family only.

Which cities? Why 25?

This dovetails nicely with the push for WFH.

Hard disagree. With WFH, cities now have beautiful but empty office buildings near public transportation. Those should be turned into housing first.

Why? They could be used as really cheap offices eventually as demand falls.

With WFH, you’ll have unused offices no matter how cheap the rent. There are simply more offices than workers to occupy them. At some point it becomes immoral not to let people live there instead.

People can never live there, it’s not up to code.

You can rent the offices really really cheap.

Change the code and it becomes way cheaper to renovate them. Turn them into dormitory style buildings with communal bathrooms and interior apartments with no outward facing windows

Most married couples would still not prefer them. It would be stuffed by single people that would otherwise be homeless.

That's fine, the married couples can live elsewhere. If the only thing we accomplish is ending homelessness, then that's a major achievement

In practice, in much of the US, it's the commute that drives people into cities (or maybe being young). But I've never lived in a city after school and had no real interest in doing so. Maybe I would have at first but like most tech companies at the time the offices were well outside the city.

A more realistic solution is just to remove restrictions that discourage MFH in the first place (zoning height limits parking requirements lot size requirements height requirements regressive fees/taxes)

How to ruin existing suburban neighborhoods in one easy step!

Of course it is not realistic. To reduce housing crisis mean to decrease demand, to decrease prices of already built houses. No one will vote for that. Housing situation will be only worse.

You don't even have to go that far, just ban single-family-only zoning. The economic pressure to add more units will take care of the rest.

And more generally move zoning to a nuisance basis (as in Japan or Europe), euclidian exclusionary zoning is a root cause of suburbian sprawl and dead areas.

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.

Zoning is already on the nuisance basis in many places in the US. It means local shops cannot pop up in residential neighborhoods if nobody wants to live near such a shop. If residents are fine with traffic, noise and pests they can vote for changing zoning on any lot to commercial. High density residential is almost the same, except there are also physical limitations of the infrastructure.

That's specifically not what nuisance basis means. That's exclusionary zoning, and the co-morbid NIMBY-ism.

In a nuisance basis zoning system, an area would not be zoned like that, a business would only be forbidden if it exceeded the nuisance level for the zone.

So in most areas, small stores and restaurants are allowed, because they are low-nuisance businesses. Even in very low nuisance areas, businesses traditionally run out of homes (e.g. very small offices, some forms of medical services, small shops, very small convenience stores / corner shops) could not be forbidden.

Commercial zoning would be for "disruptive" commerces due to traffic, noise, space requirements, sight, ...

So correct me if I get you incorrectly.

1. "NIMBY" is a Redditism for people who are apparently obsessed with the value of their property and do not allow dense residential construction only because the value of their property will plummet due to increased supply (no nuisance concerns are accepted).

2. The very same "NIMBY" do not allow commercial construction because it decreases residential supply and increases value of their property (which they are obsessed with, see #1), no nuisance concerns are accepted.

Did I get it right?

> So correct me if I get you incorrectly.

You do.

> Did I get it right?

No. Neither of your assertions is relevant to a nuisance-based zoning system. That is the point. They're only possible in an exclusionary zoning system, where plots have to be rezoned in order to have any sort of varied activity.

I don't see where am I. Your opinion is that retail is not nuisance is, you know, just your opinion. American zoning is literally based on nuisance - SFH zoning excludes nuisance sources such as multi-family housing and retail, multi-family zoning excludes retail because it's even bigger sources of nuisance than multi-family housing itself and then there is commercial zoning that is free for all.

Naturally the authors don't live in dangerous shoeboxes, dorm rooms or co-living pods they advocates the plebs should race to the bottom to.

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.

I'm sorry, but the assertions that multi-exit housing blocks take up more space is frankly bollocks.

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.

After reading your comment I'm wondering if we have read the same article. It's pretty self evident that adding an extra staircase takes up significant space as everyone who has tried to design a floor plan will tell you. For larger buildings it's not just the area of the stairwell, but also the corridor that has to connect the 2 of them.

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.

No.

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.

Safetyism will be the death of civilization.

Of a civilization.

Pedantry will kill the rest...

profits and tax revenue? how about more housing for those who need it? or should we prevent housing for the 500,000 americans who don't have it because of tornadoes?

This is what's called a false dilemma, pitting two non-mutually exclusive options as an either or situation when they're actually not opposed to one another.

We should get to reap the benefits of improved fire and personal safety and build more housing.

You would scream if those homeless died in a fire or tornado because the building lacked protection.

The two staircase rule increases costs, but not by that much - any place that allows building housing doens't have a homeless problem. That isn't to say there are no homeless people - there are many - but they are homeless because of other issues (mental). In California the homeless often are otherwise normal people who cannot afford a place to live despite the ability to work a job. Where I live you can rent a new two bedroom apartment in walking distance of Burger King that pays enough to afford that apartment and leave enough leftover for food - it won't be a great life, but you can live on one income (and since most people live as a couple that second income can buy some nice things)

I wonder if building second stairwells in multifamily buildings is really a cost effective way of mitigating stalking.

Mitigation isn’t the end result - the OP (as I read it) is saying that two exits provides for not being trapped by a stalker. You may still be stalked or approached by a malicious group of actors, but a second exit makes it much more difficult to be cornered.

It's fucked up that you have problem with society and you think the way to solve it is building code.

Maybe, but there's a long tradition that suggests maybe it's necessary...

"229 If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death."

- Hammurabi's Code, ~1750 BC

It's one thing to ensure the builder doesn't skimp on mortar and an entirely different thing to try to mitigate stalking with 2 stairwells...

This is why an architect and/or engineer(s) supervise a general contractor. A few things have changed in the construction industry over the last 3800 years.

I’m not sure why I even bother reading HN threads about construction.

And if you don't supervise well enough, should it be legally fine to give you a defective house?

If yes, that's a horrible idea. If no, then I don't see how "things have changed" in a way that's relevant to the comment you replied to.

Please respond in good faith instead of trying to ‘gotcha’ me.

There are building inspections periodically during construction by the authority having jurisdiction, with the important trades (MEP, civil, structural) having their own specialized inspections.

When you buy a new house (or a new building), you will receive a warranty for workmanship from the builder who should have corresponding workmanship warranties for all their subcontractors, and the materials will also have warranties from the manufacturer.

Lastly, you can sue the builder if all other options are exhausted.

If I was trying to 'gotcha' you I wouldn't have the if-yes, if-no section. I legitimately couldn't figure out your point. I still don't know what it is because those inspections serve the same purpose and while the mechanism is different I don't see how those differences are relevant.

As a reminder, the argument above was "It's fucked up that you have problem with society and you think the way to solve it is building code." followed by a citation for how many thousands of years building codes have been around to counter bad work. And you're saying that the ancient blunt building code has been replaced with... another kind of building code.

So what's wrong with the citation you replied to? Doesn't it serve the purpose of establishing building codes as normal? Why does it make you despair for HN's knowledge of construction? It's pretty clear they weren't suggesting current law works the same way.

I meant solving stalking and general violence level of the population with staircases :)

Who would’ve thought that the way you house citizens has an impact on their interactions.

"Think of the children" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children) has morphed into "think of the helpless women." Tell me, in places that do not have this building regulation, is stalking an epidemic at apartment buildings? In what other ways are they suffering? Would you support adding a two-stair requirement in those locales?

Yeah, that'll happen when no one thinks about women for a few hundred years. What year did your state make it illegal for a man to hit his wife?

> In what other ways are they suffering?

In Europe they are also suffering from too long toilet stalls and as a result there are mass drug use problems as well as all sorts of unsavory characters having sex in there.

You are free to choose buildings with multiple stairways if that's a requirement for you! We're talking about easing mandatory regulations, allowing builders to meet demand. We're not saying that all buildings must only have one stairway.

you might want to entertain the possibility that, due to these limitations, there’s much less families in the city, as a 3BR apartment is rare and a 4 BR apartment unheard of. In Europe and even south America, that’s not typically the case.

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)

The two-staircase requirement leads directly to apartment buildings being big, with long corridors. Given my choice of living in a small building with a few families, with one staircase, where people know each other (the one-stair architecture does in fact lend itself to residents knowing each other) or living in a big building, with long corridors, where people don’t get to know each other, I’d feel a lot safer as a woman living in the smaller building.

A 2nd set of stairs split across multiple units is a trivial matter from a cost perspective. Height restrictions, adding more office space than housing, mandatory parking etc are the real issues.

Tiny increases in construction costs get wiped out when there’s insufficient housing stock.

There is a strong correlation between construction costs and housing stock.

Not in locations where there’s a housing shortage.

Outside of skyscrapers building housing is cheap, it’s land and permission that’s the issue.

Double loaded corridors fundamentally change the composition of buildings. If you look at example floorplans, single staircase buildings typically feature 2-3 bedroom apartments, because giving every bedroom a window is easier, while double loaded corridors end up mostly with deep studios and 1-beds.

Building new housing in the US is not cheap, and reducing the leasable or buyable square footage by 10% can move projects from being profitable to build to not. Especially when the quality of the remaining square footage goes down (as it does when you have 30’ deep units with only one wall with windows).

There’s a multitude of options here for various floor plans. One of the classic solutions is an external fire escape which is cheap per apartment and isn’t impacting floor space. People may dislike the aesthetics though.

Construction costs scale to the market segment you’re targeting. It’s common to aim up market with new housing but the cost of marble isn’t the same as the cost of housing. So be careful you’re looking at the minimums not what it takes to attract high end buyers.

The staircase itself is not the issue, it's the double-loaded corridor (hotel style) layout that it forces on the entire building.

I can’t tell whether you’re unfamiliar with the single- vs. double-staircase architectural arguments, or disagreeing with them: https://slate.com/business/2021/12/staircases-floor-plan-twi...

The floor plans being compared in that example are terrible. Nobody is going to give an interior hallway windows on both ends if they don’t need to.

You also need to consider external fire escapes etc.

Aren't there other ways to address these safety issues without ballooning the cost of the building? When safety regulations come with minimal extra cost/efficiency (think: ABS or seatbelts in cars) then it's a great idea. When it mandates massive inefficiencies, it must be questioned.

> not only fire that’s a hazard, but a personal safety thing

Affordable housing. Every edge case preference accommodated. Pick one.

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