In late September, Culver City became the first municipality in California to legalize the construction of mid-rise apartment buildings with a single staircase.<\/p>\n
Unless you\u2019re a member of the niche, but fervent subculture of architects, urbanists and pro-housing advocates who clamor for \u201csingle stair reform,\u201d this might not sound like big news. But supporters say it could be the key to unleashing the kind of urban apartment building boom that years of pro-development legislation in Sacramento have tried, and so far failed<\/a>, to deliver.<\/p>\n Culver City apartments up to six stories tall can now be built around a single stairwell. Conditions apply: These buildings have to be on the small side \u2014 each floor maxes out at 4,000 square feet with no more than four units. They\u2019ll also have to abide by an array of added fire-prevention measures.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a break from the standard minimum of two staircases \u2014 connected by a corridor \u2014 required of buildings taller than three stories in nearly every other city in the country.<\/p>\n For champions of more housing development, ditching the extra staircase has become a surprisingly buzzy and enduring cause<\/a>. They say it can turbocharge urban housing construction at a modest and more affordable scale while also promoting apartments that are bigger, airier and better lighted.<\/p>\n For more than a decade in California, pro-development activists have railed against zoning, the local patchwork of restrictions on what can get built where. Those efforts are beginning to bear fruit: Earlier this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of housing<\/a>\u00a0bills<\/a> aimed at clearing legal impediments to apartment construction. The campaign for\u00a0changes to the building code<\/a>, the rules that specify in mind-numbing detail exactly how buildings must be constructed, appears to be the next chapter of this fight.<\/p>\n Single stair, and the fate of Culver City\u2019s ordinance specifically, represents an early California acid test.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is bigger than a staircase,\u201d said Bubba Fish, the Culver City councilmember who introduced the single-stair ordinance<\/a>. \u201cThe vast majority of the world builds apartments this way. We are an outlier. It touches on the housing crisis, the affordability crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n It also runs up against more than a century of American conventional wisdom<\/a> about fire safety. Multiple staircases in mid-rise apartments are meant to give occupants multiple means of escape. Though rare outside of North America, the \u201ctwo ways out\u201d rule for mid-rises has been a mainstay of fire protection policy in this country and in Canada for the last century.<\/p>\n There are a handful of exceptions: New York City, Seattle, Honolulu and, most recently, Portland, Ore.<\/a>, allow single-stair buildings up to six stories. Georgia, Vermont and Puerto Rico permit them up to four.<\/p>\n Culver City to be test case<\/p>\n Culver City is the first in California to join this small club. But the Los Angeles County burg is also likely to be the last \u2014 for now. This summer, state lawmakers passed a bill<\/a> to freeze local building code changes in place for the next six years. The city passed its ordinance before the freeze went into effect, but others exploring the change, including San Jose<\/a> and San Francisco<\/a>, didn\u2019t make the cut.<\/p>\n That gives Culver City the next half decade to show the rest of the state just how much difference a single staircase actually makes.<\/p>\n Fish, the 34-year-old councilmember, happens to be a renter in a block-spanning \u201cluxury\u201d apartment complex: \u201cOne of those fortresses that everyone makes fun of.\u201d<\/p>\n Retail and a massive parking lot on the bottom. Three floors of supersized-Lego-looking residential on top. Inside, the apartments are mostly studios and one-bedrooms, long and dimly lighted by windows confined to one side. On the other is a wide corridor that runs the length of the building with all the charm and utility of a hotel hallway.<\/p>\n Fish spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about that hallway. Sometimes he uses it as a place to play fetch with his new dog , but mostly he sees it as a blown opportunity.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of that space,\u201d Fish marvels. \u201cAll of that could be homes.\u201d<\/p>\n Reclaiming space <\/p>\n Seven percent more. That\u2019s how much floor space is dedicated to additional staircases and the various corridors that connect them in the average American apartment building, according to a first-of-its-kind study<\/a> on the safety record of single-stair buildings issued by the Pew Charitable Trusts earlier this year.<\/p>\n Reclaiming all that space is the first selling point for single-stair advocates: Less real estate for stairs means more units, bigger units, or a combination of both.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not just a numbers game. Single-stair apartment buildings are vibe enhancers, say supporters. Allowing architects to design apartment buildings that wrap around a central staircase makes it easier for them to include units with windows on multiple sides, meaning more light and more air.<\/p>\n Culver City\u2019s cap of four units per floor also nudges design away from efficiency apartments toward roomier digs that might appeal to families.<\/p>\n Single-stair apartments may be alien in much of the United States, but \u201crepresent a building more like Brooklyn or Seville or Berlin or Paris,\u201d said Ed Mendoza, a building code policy researcher at California YIMBY. \u201cThe buildings that single-stair promotes are just more \u2014 what\u2019s the word? Nicer. They\u2019re nicer.\u201d<\/p>\n More design flexibility<\/p>\n But the biggest perk of this design, according to proponents, is that it allows apartment buildings to go up on small plots of land otherwise too cramped for the modern American apartment block.<\/p>\n Seattle, like most big cities, is full of lots that are \u201cnot big enough to allow a larger scale project that would require two stairs and an elevator,\u201d said Andrew Van Leeuwen, an architect with the Seattle-based Build LLC.<\/p>\n In most cities, these parcels would be the sole domain of single-family homes interrupted by the occasional duplex. But Seattle has had a single-stair allowance on the books since the late 1970s. As a result, \u201call these funky little lots in the city of Seattle are eligible for nice little boutique apartment buildings,\u201d said Van Leeuwen.<\/p>\n In New York City, which has allowed modest single-stair buildings up to six stories for its entire history, such buildings are commonplace.<\/p>\n Promoting more nice little apartments is especially relevant to California this year. In September, Newsom signed one of the year\u2019s most contentious housing measures, Senate Bill 79<\/a>, allowing for much denser and higher residential development close to many public transit stops in major metro areas. The goal: Packing more apartments into California\u2019s major cities where reasonably affordable housing has long been in catastrophically short supply.<\/a><\/p>\n As in Seattle, plots in these neighborhoods tend to be on the small side. Under the current two-stair requirement, a California apartment developer hoping to take advantage of the new state law and build a six-story building near a train station would need to either purchase a massive lot nearby (an expensive and rare find) or successfully convince a row of neighbors to sell their properties at the same time (also expensive, even rarer).<\/p>\n Zoning and single-stair reform are \u201ctwo great tastes that taste great together,\u201d said Stephen Smith, founder of the Center for Building in North America and lead author of the Pew study.<\/p>\n Fire officials generally oppose the design<\/p>\n Whenever a local or state government considers this particular change to the code, fire marshals, fire chiefs and firefighter unions regularly rise up to oppose it. The logic of their argument is intuitive enough: In the event of a fire, the more ways out the better.<\/p>\n Rules requiring multiple internal staircases were born of tragedies. \u201cGreat\u201d fires engulfed cities like Chicago<\/a>, Seattle<\/a>, and San Francisco<\/a> in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers trapped at the top of a 10-story building.<\/p>\n The newly sanctioned apartments in Culver City are modeled on Seattle\u2019s ordinance with fire prevention in mind: The unit count is capped, minimizing the chances of overcrowding in the stairwell. The sole stairway itself must either be pressurized to keep out the smoke or open air. The entire building must be outfitted with the highest class<\/a> of automatic sprinkler systems. That\u2019s all on top of the strict fire-prevention standards already required of mid-rise apartment buildings<\/a>: alarm systems, fire-rated walls around stairwells, doors that are set to close automatically.<\/p>\n But no fire prevention system \u2014 nor a complex of systems \u2014 is perfect.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat if something happens and that one stairwell is blocked?\u201d said Sean DeCrane with the International Assn. of Fire Fighters union. And while sprinkler systems and alarms are effective, they have to be maintained. \u201cWe can\u2019t just design a building for Day One of opening. We have to think about the life of the building, and I don\u2019t think people are thinking about that as they approach this issue.\u201d<\/p>\n What the data show<\/p>\n DeCrane\u2019s concerns aren\u2019t reflected in the available data. The Pew study pored over residential fire deaths across New York City in 2012-24 and found that the fatality rate in single-stair buildings was both low and equal to other residential structures. No deaths were obviously attributable to the lack of a second way out. The study likewise could find no deaths in Seattle over the same time period that could be blamed on a missing staircase.<\/p>\n Single-stair skeptics say New York City and Seattle, with their large, professional fire departments, are not representative of much of the rest of the country.<\/p>\n Exporting New York and Seattle\u2019s building code to other municipalities is based on \u201cthe assumption that the fire department is going to be able to respond with sufficient resources,\u201d said DeCrane.<\/p>\n Not that buildings allowed under the current code are entirely risk-free.<\/p>\n In a modern American apartment complex, the distance from any one unit to the nearest staircase might be 250 feet<\/a>, said Travis Morgan, co-founder of the Livable Cities Initiative, which advocated for the Culver City policy. \u201cThose corridors fill up with smoke, so now you\u2019re having to do a fireman crawl along the floor for potentially hundreds of feet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Debate over risks<\/p>\n Even if single-stair apartment buildings were found to be more dangerous \u2014 and they haven\u2019t been yet \u2014 Smith said the debate over single stair reveals a more fundamental philosophical split over how much risk society is willing to take on and whether certain dangers are more tolerable than others.<\/p>\n \u201cFire and building officials are looking to drive down the rate of death in new buildings and that is actually pretty different from driving down the rate of death overall,\u201d he said. \u201cYou could mandate that every room has a fire station in it, but then that will make the world much less safe because then you live in a world where no one can live in new apartment buildings\u201d because they are so impractically expensive.<\/p>\n Instead, would-be tenants would turn to older apartment buildings, single-family homes or, in the most extreme cases, shelters and encampments. All are more vulnerable to fire danger<\/a> than newly constructed mid-rises. With fewer apartments in urban cores, more renters would also likely live farther away, forcing them to commute, which comes with its own set of risks.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happens when you drive? You die. You die at really high risks on the road,\u201d said Smith. \u201cThat\u2019s a life and safety risk and it\u2019s one that never gets accounted for in developing building codes.\u201d<\/p>\n Even if you buy that argument, it makes for a tough sell.<\/p>\n Unlike prior housing policy battles, in which development boosters have warred with neighborhood groups and property owners over relatively anodyne concerns like parking<\/a>, shadows<\/a> and \u201cneighborhood character,\u201d pushing changes through the building code puts activists in the unenviable political position of disputing rules ostensibly written to keep people alive.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s almost impossible to go up against firefighters,\u201d said Mendoza with California YIMBY. \u201cThey are a highly beloved group.\u201d<\/p>\n How Culver City voted <\/p>\n The elected officials in Culver City didn\u2019t seem to have much trouble. The vote to pass the ordinance was unanimous.<\/p>\n Next came the review by the state\u2019s Building Standards Commission. Under California law, building codes are imposed statewide. Locals are then free to amend them, so long as they are \u201cmore restrictive.\u201d Rescinding a required staircase would seem, on its face, to be less\u00a0restrictive, though supporters of the ordinance argued that the additional safety requirements demanded of single-stair buildings make it more so \u2014 or, at least, a wash.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the commission accepted Culver City\u2019s code change. But it left things on an ambiguous note, warning in a letter to city staff that the ordinance \u201cmay contain a local amendment that is less restrictive\u201d than the state code and therefore conflicts with state law.<\/p>\n Translation: The state won\u2019t be the final judge of whether the code is or isn\u2019t illegal. If Culver City wants to permit these types of buildings, it can go ahead at its own risk.<\/p>\n In the past, local governments have attempted to promote their own stricter rules over the state\u2019s clerical objections only to have developers take them to court. But this is a more unusual case of a local government changing the code not to ratchet up safety measures or energy efficiency requirements, but in order to lower costs and promote development.<\/p>\n If anyone opts to challenge Culver City\u2019s novel approach, it\u2019s not likely to be a developer.<\/p>\n That leaves Culver City\u2019s ordinance in effect for now. Though the moratorium remains in effect, more changes to the prevailing legislative thinking on staircases could be coming soon. A 2023 state law<\/a> directed the state fire marshal to study the state\u2019s single-stair rules. That report is due in January.<\/p>\n Christopher writes for CalMatters.<\/p>\n