Dive Brief:
- The City Council in Culver City, California, voted unanimously Sept. 29 to allow a single exit stairway in residential buildings up to six stories high, becoming the first city in the state to enact such a measure.
- The city says the new ordinance could shave as much as 13% off the cost of building small lot residential buildings, which were previously required to have two staircases.
- “This reform paves the way for more human-scale affordable homes across our city,” Culver City Councilmember Bryan “Bubba” Fish said on social media following the vote.
Dive Insight:
As city leaders across the country explore solutions to the ongoing housing crisis, long-standing building codes that require two staircases in small and mid-size apartment buildings have come under their microscope.
Such building regulations can drive up construction costs and discourage development of “missing middle” housing such as duplexes, fourplexes, townhomes and small single-unit dwellings.
“The two-stairway requirement makes it especially difficult to build apartments or condominiums on small or irregularly shaped pieces of land in already built-up areas, … which are often the main type of land available for development … in expensive U.S. cities and towns,” according to a Pew report released earlier this year.
Two-staircase building codes are in place as a fire safety measure, but recent studies have shown that due to modern fire mitigation efforts such as sprinklers, self-closing doors and fire-safe materials, single-staircase multifamily buildings pose no additional fire death risk.
New York City, Seattle, Honolulu and Austin, Texas, all preceded Culver City with single-staircase legislation, and 21 states, cities and provinces across North America are exploring similar reforms, according to a single-staircase policy tracker.
