https://twitter.com/YIMBYLAND/status/1786124365429420491?t=yEW-c-Scmh75mZa8hCKz3A&s=19
Austin city council just passed a resolution directing staff to look at single-stair reform as a part of their 2024 building code update!
This is a MASSIVE step toward enabling more missing-middle and affordable housing to be built in Austin!
Single stair apartments are illegal in most.US cities, with most places requiring dual stairs. Think of your average large apartment complex or hotel, how it's usually one single corridor with rooms on both sides and a stairway at both ends.
A single stair though basically reduces the amount of circulation space required in a multi-unit building, allowing for more living space as well as better floor plans, better light, better architecture in general. Think of many of those European style apartments you've seen, most are probably single-stair that is illegal to build here.
Many peoples first thought is "that seems unsafe", but nothing really points to that being true.
https://ggwash.org/view/93257/how-single-stair-apartments-can-improve-fire-safety?
Safety advances should be evaluated together
One of the most underappreciated success stories of the past 100 years has been the miraculous decline in the fire death rate: by 90% over the past century and by 60% since just 1980. Some factors include less smoking and widespread smoke detectors.
Multifamily buildings are now particularly safe from fire deaths, largely due to building code requirements for sprinklers. The National Fire Protection Association notes that in 1980, house and multifamily fires had comparable chances of causing deaths; by 2022, the death rate for multifamily fires had fallen 17% while those for house fires had actually risen. Yet because sprinklers are usually only installed in new apartments, their adoption has been slow; only 7% of home fires happen in sprinklered residences. Increasing the number of sprinklered residences is key to further advancing fire safety.
Second staircases are a holdover from early fire codes, which focused on evacuating occupants; since then, material and building science advances have improved our ability to isolate and suppress fires, and firefighting equipment has improved. Because of those advances, the commercial codes continued insistence on extra staircases amounts to a belt and suspenders approach to fire safety. Just as suspenders were replaced by belts in the early 20th century, perhaps its time for fire codes to evolve beyond the second stair.