Have you heard about “single-stair reform,” the idea sweeping the urbanist community of developers and housing-density proponents?
Culver City just became the first municipality in the state of California to change its building code with an ordinance that allows buildings up to six stories high to be constructed with just one staircase, departing from the two-staircase requirement for buildings taller than three floors.
“A multiunit residential building over three stories that has only one stairway and one exit is not safe,” wrote the California Professional Firefighters in a September 15 letter to Los Angeles City Council president Marqueece Harris-Dawson. CPF is the labor organization that represents “over 35,000 career firefighting and emergency medical service personnel statewide.”
But what do they know about firefighting? The city council of Culver City, on the other hand, can point to a study by Pew Charitable Trusts, written with representatives of the Center for Building in North America and based on data from places that are not Southern California. Choose your experts.
The L.A. City Council has so far declined to allow single-stair mid-rise buildings. Later this month, the State Fire Marshal is expected to deliver a report to the Legislature and the California Building Standards Commission “to address fire and life safety or emergency activities in single-exit, single stairway apartment houses, with more than 2 dwelling units, in buildings above 3 stories.”
The report was ordered by Assembly Bill 835 in 2023. An earlier version of the bill directed the State Fire Marshal “to research, develop, and propose building standards,” but after opposition from the California Professional Firefighters, the bill was watered down to require only a study to be completed by January 1, 2026.
Culver City didn’t want to wait. In September, the city council passed an “urgency ordinance” that cited “climate change effects in Culver City, including more frequent and intense heat waves, that necessitate a shift toward building forms that consume less energy and reduce urban heat island effects.”
With more “operable windows,” the ordinance declared, “single-stair buildings support climate-adaptive design by reducing dependence on mechanical heating and cooling,” and this will “protect residents without access to or those who cannot afford to run air conditioning units.”
Culver City could just say California has the highest poverty rate in the country when the cost of living is taken into account, electricity rates are double the national average, many people can’t afford air conditioning or heating and therefore the only solution is to build narrow tenements on urban parcels so people can experience what it was like to live before the 20th century.
Maybe the elected officials preferred not to put that in writing. So what the ordinance says instead is that the buildings will have many modern fire-safety requirements: sprinklers, fire extinguishers, a “smokeproof enclosure” stairway, walls that can last for 1 hour on fire and “20 feet of width” in front and back for “fire department aerial ladders.”
This will be especially helpful when people who can’t afford “mechanical heating” use propane or kerosene heaters and accidentally set the building on fire. Or when a nearby homeless encampment’s warming fires get a little too close to the doorway where the single stairs are located, trapping everyone above the first floor.
Perhaps that’s one of many reasons insurance premiums for apartment buildings have skyrocketed.
If you moved to California yesterday and have no idea what’s going on here, we have environmental restrictions that prevent the creation of fire breaks on state land, we have regularly occurring high wind events and droughts, we have the largest unsheltered homeless population of any state, and local fire department resources are insufficient to respond quickly to every threatened structure during a major disaster.
Also, there’s an occasional problem with hydrants not having water, reservoirs not being filled, electricity shut-offs during fires for public safety, and fire department responses slowed by “road diet” changes to traffic lanes.
For all these reasons, it’s a good idea to have two staircases in a six-story apartment building so people have the best chance to get out safely if one staircase is obstructed during a fire.
It’s not an out-of-date, outlier requirement. It’s the wisdom of long experience.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley