One California city’s idea to tackle the housing crisis: Take the stairs

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 — each floor maxes out at 4,000 square feet with no more than four units. They’ll also have to abide by an array of added fire-prevention measures.

That’s a break from the standard minimum of two staircases — connected by a corridor — required of buildings taller than three stories in nearly every other city in the country.

For YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard) and other champions of more housing development, ditching the extra staircase has become a surprisingly buzzy and enduring cause. It’s one weird trick, they say, that can turbo-charge urban housing construction at a modest and more affordable scale while also promoting apartments that are bigger, airier and better lit.

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 housingbills aimed at clearing legal impediments to apartment construction. The campaign for changes to the building code, the rules that specify in mind-numbing detail exactly how buildings must be constructed, appears to be the next chapter of this fight. Single stair, and the fate of Culver City’s ordinance specifically, represents an early California acid test.

“This is bigger than a staircase,” said Bubba Fish, the Culver City councilmember who introduced the single-stair ordinance. “The vast majority of the world builds apartments this way. We are an outlier. It touches on the housing crisis, the affordability crisis.”

It also runs up against more than a century of American conventional wisdom 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 “two ways out” rule for mid-rises has been a mainstay of fire protection policy in this country and in Canada for the last century.

There are a handful of exceptions: New York City, Seattle, Honolulu and, most recently, Portland, Oregon, allow single-stair buildings up to six stories. Georgia, Vermont and Puerto Rico permit them up to four.

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 — for now. This summer, state lawmakers passed a bill 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 and San Francisco, didn’t make the cut.

That gives Culver City the next half decade to show the rest of the state just how much difference a single staircase actually makes.

Is one staircase better than two?

Fish, the 34-year-old councilmember, happens to be a renter in a block-spanning “luxury” apartment complex: “One of those fortresses that everyone makes fun of.”

You know the type.

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 lit 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.

Fish spends an inordinate 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.

“All of that space,” Fish marvels. “All of that could be homes.”

Seven percent more. That’s 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 on the safety record of single-stair buildings issued by the Pew Charitable Trusts earlier this year.

But it’s 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.

Culver City’s cap of four units per floor also nudges design away from efficiency apartments toward roomier digs that might appeal to families.

Single-stair apartments may be alien in much of the United States, but “represent a building more like Brooklyn or Seville or Berlin or Paris,” said Ed Mendoza, a building code policy researcher at California YIMBY. “The buildings that single-stair promotes are just more — what’s the word? Nicer. They’re nicer.”

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.

“Funky little lots”

Seattle, like most big cities, is full of lots that are “not big enough to allow a larger scale project that would require two stairs and an elevator,” said Andrew Van Leeuwen, an architect with the Seattle-based Build LLC.

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, “all these funky little lots in the city of Seattle are eligible for nice little boutique apartment buildings,” said Van Leeuwen.

In New York City, which has allowed modest single stair buildings up to six stories for its entire history, such buildings are commonplace.

Promoting more nice little apartments is especially relevant to California this year. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed one of the year’s most contentious housing measures, Senate Bill 79, 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’s major cities where reasonably affordable housing has long been in catastrophically short supply.

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).

Zoning and single-stair reform are “two great tastes that taste great together,” said Stephen Smith, founder of the Center for Building in North America and lead author of the Pew study.

The safety record on single stair

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.

Rules requiring multiple internal staircases were born of tragedies. “Great” fires engulfed cities like Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers trapped at the top of a 10-story building.

The newly sanctioned apartments in Culver City are modeled on Seattle’s 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 of automatic sprinkler systems. That’s all on top of the strict fire-prevention standards already required of mid-rise apartment buildings: alarm systems, fire-rated walls around stairwells, doors that are set to close automatically.

But no fire prevention system — nor a complex of systems — is perfect.

“What if something happens and that one stairwell is blocked?” said Sean DeCrane with the International Association of Fire Fighters union. And while sprinkler systems and alarms are effective, they have to be maintained. “We can’t just design a building for Day One of opening. We have to think about the life of the building, and I don’t think people are thinking about that as they approach this issue.”

DeCrane’s concerns aren’t reflected in the available data. The Pew study pored over residential fire deaths across New York City between 2012 to 2024 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.

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.

Exporting New York and Seattle’s building code to other municipalities is based on “the assumption that the fire department is going to be able to respond with sufficient resources,” said Crane.

Weighing costs and benefits

Not that buildings allowed under the current code are entirely risk-free.

In a modern American apartment complex, the distance from any one unit to the nearest staircase might be 250 feet, said Travis Morgan, co-founder of the Livable Cities Initiative, which advocated for the Culver City policy. “Those corridors fill up with smoke, so now you’re having to do a fireman crawl along the floor for potentially hundreds of feet,” he said.

Even if single stair apartment buildings were found to be more dangerous — and they haven’t been yet — 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.

“Fire 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,” he said. “You 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” because they are so impractically expensive.

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 than newly-constructed mid-rises. With fewer apartments in urban cores, more renters would also likely live further away, forcing them to commute, which comes with its own set of risks.

“What happens when you drive? You die. You die at really high risks on the road,” said Smith. “That’s a life and safety risk and it’s one that never gets accounted for in developing building codes.”

Even if you buy that argument, it makes for a tough sell.

Unlike prior housing policy battles, in which development boosters have warred with neighborhood groups and property owners over relatively anodyne concerns like parking, shadows and “neighborhood character,” pushing changes through the building code puts activists in the unenviable political position of disputing rules ostensibly written to keep people alive.

“It’s almost impossible to go up against firefighters,” said Mendoza with California YIMBY. “They are a highly beloved group.”

In effect, but legally uncertain

The elected officials in Culver City didn’t seem to have much trouble. The vote to pass the ordinance was unanimous.

Next came the review by the state’s Building Standards Commission. Under California law, building codes are imposed statewide. Locals are then free to amend them, so long as they are “more restrictive.” Rescinding a required staircase would seem, on its face, to be less restrictive, though supporters of the ordinance argued that the additional safety requirements demanded of single stair buildings make it more so — or, at least, a wash.

Ultimately, the commission accepted Culver City’s code change. But they left things on an ambiguous note, warning in a letter to city staff that the ordinance “may contain a local amendment that is less restrictive” than the state code and therefore conflicts with state law.

Translation: The state won’t be the final judge of whether the code is or isn’t illegal. If Culver City wants to permit these types of buildings, it can go ahead at its own risk.

In the past, local governments have attempted to promote their own stricter rules over the state’s 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.

If anyone opts to challenge Culver City’s novel approach, it’s not likely to be a developer.

That leaves Culver City’s 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 directed the state Fire Marshal to study the state’s single-stair rules. That report is due in January.

This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.