What do stairs have to do with California’s housing crisis? More than you might think, say many local policymakers.
Cities across the state have been considering building code changes to allow new apartment buildings to be constructed with fewer staircases. But where other cities missed a key deadline, Culver City got it done.
In late September, the Culver City Council unanimously voted to pass a guarantee that developers can build up to six stories with just one staircase.
“We're the only city in California to legalize it by ordinance,” said Councilmember Bryan “Bubba” Fish. “I hope that we can be a bit of a bellwether.”
Advocates for the change say it’ll create larger, family-sized apartments on smaller plots of land. But firefighters have come out against these proposals, saying they endanger residents and emergency response crews.
Fish, who pushed for the change in Culver City, lives in a typical kind of new apartment building. It’s large, boxy and has three staircases. The units on each floor are separated by a long hallway. It’s a dimly lit, liminal space — kind of like what you’d see in a hotel.
Fish said he sometimes plays fetch with his dog Walter in this hallway. But otherwise, he sees it as a lot of wasted space.
Many CA cities wanted to build more housing by eliminating stair requirements. Only Culver City got it done
“No one is using this for anything but just getting where they need to go,” Fish said. “A single-stair building uses this space that we're in right now for more homes, which is what we desperately need right now.”
Single-stair buildings common in other countries
In most of the U.S., local building codes require apartment buildings to have two or more staircases connected by a hallway. With California facing a severe housing shortage, many cities across the state have proposed getting rid of those mandates.
“The requirement makes residential buildings have to look like hotels,” Fish said. “I don't really want to live in a hotel. I want to live in a home.”
In Europe, Asia and other parts of the world, buildings are allowed to wrap around one stairwell. That means they can be built on smaller lots. The lack of hallways and second stairs provides space for additional bedrooms, making apartments larger and more suitable for families.
Fish recently saw this firsthand.
“I went to Berlin not too long ago,” he said. “The units were much larger. There were more of them. There were more bedrooms in every unit, and they were more homey feeling.”
Cities faced deadline to pass single-stair reforms
Single-stair reform is an idea that took hold in many California cities in recent years. But they all needed to pass their proposals by Oct. 1. That’s when state law AB 130 kicked in, freezing local building codes for the next six years.
Culver City is the only city that passed a comprehensive ordinance in time. Larger cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco also considered single-stair changes, but they all missed the deadline.
In L.A., records show the City Attorney’s Office privately pushed back on the Council’s efforts to pass a single-stair ordinance ahead of the Oct. 1 deadline.
A motion instructing the office to draft an ordinance passed votes in committee and in the full City Council. But a Sept. 8 confidential report obtained by LAist shows that City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto told councilmembers such a change would be “preempted by, contrary to and illegal under California state law.”
Feldstein Soto went on to say the L.A. Fire Department told her office that the City Council’s proposal would have to be contingent on future changes to state and local fire codes, according to the report.
A spokesperson for Feldstein Soto told LAist her office sent the council a draft ordinance Sept. 11, but the council sent it back to committee. They said the delay in passage “had nothing to do with our office.”
Advocates for single-stair reform said the draft ordinance would not have resulted in viable single-stair projects.
This is not the first time the City Attorney’s office has pushed back on housing-related efforts by the council. She recently refused to sign a tenant aid contract the council was relying on to expand legal assistance to low-income renters facing eviction.
Feldstein Soto argued the sole-source contract violated the city’s charter.
Santa Monica’s City Council voted in September to change local rules, allowing for single-stair buildings up to six stories. But unlike in Culver City, in many cases those developments will not be guaranteed a smooth path forward — they’ll face reviews that could halt projects.
Some say reforms are ‘paradigm changing’
Eduardo Mendoza with the Livable Communities Initiative said other cities will be missing out — not just on new kinds of apartments but potentially new types of condos.
“I've spoken with developers, and they have confidently told me, ‘Listen, if we could put 20 units on a lot and have them for sale, we could sell these things for $550,000 in most markets in L.A.,” Mendoza said. “And I'm like, holy s--t. That is paradigm changing.”
But there is one group opposed to this change: firefighters. They’ve said during a fire, having just one way for residents to get out of a building while crews try to get in would be hazardous.
Sean DeCrane, the assistant to the general president for health and safety at the International Association of Fire Fighters, said that’s why “building codes and fire codes require, when you go above three stories in the U.S., that you provide two ways out of a building.”
Single-stair buildings are already allowed in Seattle and New York City. A recent study from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the rate of fire deaths in modern New York single-stair buildings has been no different than in two-stair buildings.
But DeCrane said what works for New York may not work in other cities.
“FDNY can put 56 firefighters on the scene of an apartment fire within 10 minutes,” he said. “It's hard to take that same scenario and then put it into a smaller town.”
Other safety features will be required
Single-stair proponents argue that safety concerns can be addressed by installing features such as sprinklers and pressurized stairwells that keep out smoke.
Architect Erik Mar said he’s happy to see the change in building rules coming to Culver City.
“By insisting on that one kind of typology, we've essentially designed ourselves into a corner,” Mar said. “The quality of life in these urban areas not only gets more expensive, but it gets degraded by longer commutes, more traffic, more urban sprawl.”
Fish said Culver City will require new safety features in single-stair buildings. The change won’t take effect until the state’s Building Standards Commission signs off.
If and when that happens, Fish said he’ll be excited to see different kinds of housing being built.
“To any developers who want to create some really interesting new, modern homes that are not going to be legal anywhere else in the state, come to Culver City,” he said.
