The Case of The Second Egress and the Missing Middle
December 31, 2021 3:22 PM   Subscribe

McGill University architecture student Conrad Speckert's thesis, The Second Egress: Building a Code Change, takes aim at an obstacle to building midrise housing that would fill in the "missing middle" between single-family houses and tall condo towers: a building code requirement for more than one exit in housing taller than two storeys.

From Speckert's proposal for a building code change:
The requirement for two means of egress for low and mid-rise residential buildings exceeding two storeys is inconsistent with building codes outside Canada, is an outdated artefact of pre-modern fire safety practices in combustible building construction and is an unnecessary burden on the construction of missing middle housing typologies.
...
The National Building Code should harmonize with the Seattle Building Code to permit up to 5 storeys of residential occupancy to be served by a single exit. This would allow the construction of apartment buildings of up to 6 storeys above grade to be served by one exit stair.
This is a part of a small movement to embrace single-stair buildings in the United States and Canada, following the example of many other countries: The question touches on a number of inter-related areas: NIMBYism, affordable housing, how building codes develop over time, different approaches to firefighting, and how buildings both influence and reflect culture.

Bonus section of Speckert's thesis: the Manual of Illegal Floor Plans.
posted by metaquarry (75 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
I gotta say, as someone who’s spent my entire adult life in cities filled with old 3-flats and pr-war buildings , there’s just this thing called the “back porch” for each unit, which leads out to the second exit staircase / fire escape. It’s a solved problem. I can’t imagine people are like “ew, I hate my back porch, I wish I didn’t have it.” Even if it’s just an enclosed back stair is this really such a huge problem?
posted by Hypatia at 3:37 PM on December 31, 2021 [15 favorites]


A fire escape out of the back of a building, of the type typically found on 3- and 6-plexes, does not generally meet current code for a second egress. These stairs are too steep, they curve or wind, and so on. You can't build those buildings in the same way any more.

The space required to install a set of stairs that is designed to the required egress standard makes this style of building (stacked apartments in row house lots) basically unbuildable in many places, because there simply isn't enough space to build two exits on small urban lots. It is a huge problem.
posted by ssg at 3:54 PM on December 31, 2021 [10 favorites]


This is super interesting, thank you for posting.

It is an example of a seemingly small thing that has huge implications, like how minimum parking requirements shape so much of our built environment here.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:03 PM on December 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


Obvs, the answer is to convert all the space wasted on parking into extra staircases. Wooden staircases also use a lot of wood, so this could be a truly carbon negative strategy for urban renewal. In conclusion, Vote #1 Quidnunc Kid.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:15 PM on December 31, 2021 [6 favorites]


Relaxing the requirements for the second exit would be a better solution than eliminating it altogether. Perhaps I spend too much time reading about engineering/design disasters, but the hubris in assuming that any sort of building is "fire proof" is troublesome. Modern buildings are "tightly coupled systems"- if everything is built to spec and properly maintained, the fire safety is probably fine. In the real world, people are constantly disabling smoke detectors for nuisance tripping, shutting off leaking sprinklers, replacing fire code approved materials with non approved materials during renovations. Those "old, outdated regulations" were written in blood.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:17 PM on December 31, 2021 [38 favorites]


Interesting. I live in 5 story multi unit building built in the late 1880s/early 1900s and like Hypatia, I was wondering why the back emergency stairs don't seem to count as a second egress and within a few minutes someone answered why! I share some of Larry David's (!?) concerns too . . . I think it's easy for us to kinda discount how important building regulations are. On the other hand, whole cities built before WWII have millions of people living in them (and have for decades) and are mostly just fine and we really need more housing everywhere.
posted by flamk at 4:30 PM on December 31, 2021 [2 favorites]


This is fine if you also limit car ownership by the tenants of these 5 story buildings.

If you don’t, parking in those neighborhoods becomes impossible, and congestion on the roads strangles your city almost to death, which is exactly what’s happened to Seattle.
posted by jamjam at 4:42 PM on December 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


Yeah, I remember such "example of many other countries" as the Kyoto Animation fire, where someone spread gasoline at the sole street entrance and the only other escape was an open stairway to the roof. 36 people died in that "missing middle" sized building. Two separated exits to the ground always, and frankly, fuck people who try to sell "well this building is fire proof" to cheap out.
posted by tavella at 4:47 PM on December 31, 2021 [16 favorites]


Limiting car ownership by tenants is pretty iffy. The actual solution is to relax parking requirements.

I have read most of the links but still don't really understand how this isn't solvable without much trouble by architecture. Perhaps this is a problem of building code minutiae that I'm just not understanding. I will admit the floor plan stuff is not too obvious to me, not being versed in the discipline, and I don't feel like going down that rabbit hole anytime soon.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:55 PM on December 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


High-Rise Buildings are good for housing density, but their weakness is elevator maintenance. Many High-Rises have too few elevators to deal with technical problems when they come up, and can quickly turn ugly, as we've seen with some crappy old High-Rises in Covid-times. Now we have many rather cheaply-built high Condos which will self-destruct within our lifetime.
posted by ovvl at 4:56 PM on December 31, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yeah, ideally, you upgrade your public transit infrastructure, then you relax parking requirements on areas served by that infrastructure and allow increased density in those areas, but then I'd also like a pony. But as someone in the building industry I'm really hesitant to relax the 2nd egress requirement. I don't think you get much bang for the buck in floor area, and I've worked on a 1940 apartment building that caught fire, killing 6 people, that had one stair plus a bunch of fire escapes that older people couldn't navigate.
posted by LionIndex at 5:04 PM on December 31, 2021 [9 favorites]


I don't know how we can be alive in the time of the Grenfell Tower fire disaster and even entertain this idea. I would never, ever allow myself to live in a building with only one staircase.
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:19 PM on December 31, 2021 [20 favorites]


Nooo oo this is just a grab for cheaper construction / more marketable square footage by developers. A second means of egress is not preventing any kind of housing construction. I've worked on some wonky old buildings and it's not some kind of difficult challenge or giant space suck unless you're also trying to have a bunch of 2-story units because they sell for more. I am familiar with sprinklers and they're great but not fail-safe and require regular maintenance.

If you haven't seen a building fire in person it can seem abstract and unlikely. In person they're horrifying.
posted by sepviva at 5:29 PM on December 31, 2021 [7 favorites]


I could be wrong but the "It's fine because bad things hardly ever happen" school of decision making can eat my non-existent left nut.
posted by bleep at 5:29 PM on December 31, 2021 [14 favorites]


Limiting car ownership by tenants is pretty iffy. The actual solution is to relax parking requirements.

Too bad Kubrick isn’t still around to make

'Dr. Strangelove II or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Automobile.'
posted by jamjam at 5:30 PM on December 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


5 story buildings are the focus of this kind of thing because taller than that and the construction types change and require much more professional (higher paid, less exploitable) labor, so there's a big jump in cost and barrier to entry to build them. So they're a sweet spot of high profit and any old bro with some cash can probably get one built. Has nothing to do with "affordability" or "increasing supply".
posted by sepviva at 5:34 PM on December 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


As someone that evacuated from a 4 story apartment building this very morning because of a fire... yeah, nope. I don't care that "in most other countries, that second means of egress is the fire brigade.” That strikes me as a horrific and potentially tragic oversight. It took >15 minutes to get everyone out and I can't imagine how much worse it would have been with a single staircase and a more serious fire. Nevermind at least once a week I have to use a different staircase than the one I wanted because someone is moving furniture through it or something.

I also notice that in the scissor stair case study the architect opted to use the extra space afforded by using only a single stair to... make the single stair take up the space of two stairwells. I submit that the architect in question is more concerned with design aesthetics than construction cost or resident safety, but maybe I'm just cranky because my sleep was interrupted by a fire evacuation.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 5:40 PM on December 31, 2021 [27 favorites]


Relaxing the requirements for the second exit would be a better solution than eliminating it altogether. Perhaps I spend too much time reading about engineering/design disasters, but the hubris in assuming that any sort of building is "fire proof" is troublesome. Modern buildings are "tightly coupled systems"- if everything is built to spec and properly maintained, the fire safety is probably fine. In the real world, people are constantly disabling smoke detectors for nuisance tripping, shutting off leaking sprinklers, replacing fire code approved materials with non approved materials during renovations. Those "old, outdated regulations" were written in blood.

But where is the real world? Is Seattle in the real world, or is Toronto? Is Berlin, or is Montreal? Are Canadians such scofflaw anarchists that they disable smoke detectors and perform under-code renovations to much higher frequency than Seattlites or Berliners? Because the regulations are wildly different in those places -- a single stair building can be built three times higher in Seattle and in Berlin than in Canada. By definition, there are only three possibilities -- Canadians are scofflaw anarchists that can't be trusted with a toaster oven (in which case the difference in regulations is sensible), or Seattle and Berlin are chockablock with incredibly unsafe housing (since their regulations are so lax), or the Canadian regulations are overconservative.

The problem with safety regulations can be (and I'm not saying for sure it is in this or any other case) that regulators in charge of one aspect tend to make it as safe as possible. Which is their remit! But this can conflict with other types of safety.

US rail regulators have very strict standards for safety that means that US passenger rail fleets must be able to survive collisions with freight trains. Which means that US passenger trains are way more expensive and slow than international ones, and that US rail projects tend towards more infrastructure to separate passenger and freight rail if possible. Which means that US rail is expensive and doesn't get built and that which is built is slow and unattractive. In the very unlikely chance of a train-on-train collision, the system is safer -- but the cost is that millions of trips aren't being made by rail because the service isn't there or because the service sucks. And those millions of trips are mostly being made by car, which is 15 times more dangerous per mile. Rail safety regulators are fine with causing a hundred road deaths to prevent a rail death, because their remit is to prevent rail deaths.

It's the same thing here -- denser cities support more transit and less car use, which saves lives both directly through fewer collisions -- there are 13 road deaths for every structure fire death in the US -- as well as semidirectly through less air pollution and indirectly through less climate change. Denser cities even support faster fire response, which reduces fire deaths. It's not a situation where 'making buildings safer' has no cost on the other side (if not, why not mandate three exits? Or four?)

It's a tradeoff, where 'making buildings easier to exit in a fire' conflicts with 'making safer cities and a safer planet'. I don't know where the optimum is; but the fact that Canadian codes are three times more restrictive than other codes in respectable jurisdictions suggests that perhaps the needle needs to swing towards enabling denser, safer cities.
posted by Superilla at 5:42 PM on December 31, 2021 [24 favorites]


It's nice that MetaFilter posts have points of egress at both the top and the bottom, so that one can escape a comments section containing dangerously high amounts of anecdotal evidence without having to scroll back over any of it.
posted by Panthalassa at 6:12 PM on December 31, 2021 [17 favorites]


Fires are more dangerous in dense places. There's a reason dense cities have been where fire safety innovations originate.

I live somewhere that it takes the fire department mere minutes to get to fires. It's also really dense compared to the vast majority of the country. There's a long history of fire safety developments. They aren't arbitrary, they have to do with how long it takes to exit. People still die in fires. I don't think you'll find anyone here who thinks less than two exits is anything other than insane, unless they profit from "denser" real estate. Single rowhouses need two exits (not stairs).
posted by sepviva at 6:23 PM on December 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


I also notice that in the scissor stair case study the architect opted to use the extra space afforded by using only a single stair to... make the single stair take up the space of two stairwells.

I also thought that the design for the single stair made it look like your gain was "unusable extra space." It did not do much to support the argument they were putting forth.

Those scissor stairs are interesting. I've never seen a set in the wild. Everybody has a path to the ground floor, but you have to navigate a hallway and two staircases to go up or down a single floor.
posted by Well I never at 7:06 PM on December 31, 2021


The irony here is that it's pretty easy to build an economical and comfortable 5 story apartment building with lots of units and two means of egress. It's called the Kruschyova, because the Soviet bloc built tens of thousands of these after the war, but Western Europe built them too, and they're hidden in plain sight all over Canada and the United States. (Those La Quinta suite hotels that look like the suites could be converted to condo apartments with a stroke of the pen? Krushchyovas.) They don't have to look like a Soviet tower block. If you want it to look and feel like a Parisian apartment block, you can. If you want the facade to look irregular so it looks like an older city block, you can. Kruschyovas exist because the form factor hits a sweet spot: lots of units, fire safe, easy and quick to build, and you only need one elevator.

All you need is a large enough lot size so you get a long corridor connecting apartments to the two staircases on each floor. So how do you get them built where land is subdivided too small for it? Options. You buy options on people's houses, and when you get options on a contiguous lot that meets the need, you buy them out and plant a kruschyova. The issue is that once you make that move you're the villain in a Hallmark Christmas movie, and good luck getting the permits to build.

Meanwhile, ironically, real estate developers who really are villains buy land by the square mile, and subdivide the land to put up single family homes, creating a red tape barrier that prevents more responsible infill later on.
posted by ocschwar at 7:38 PM on December 31, 2021 [18 favorites]


So there's some data on United States residential fire deaths here, but it is not sliced by building type or age, nor could I find any such data for the US market. Seems like something we should have.

But interpolating from the data in that USFA report, is appears there are an average of 2,770 residential fire deaths each year, and roughly 600 have "egress issues" listed as cause. "Egress issues" for this study comprises blocked egresses, locked egress doors, inadequate egress widths, inadequate numbers of egress, etc.

I would love to see that data broken down a bit further, but I'm not sure USFA tracks cause at that level of granularity. The best I can say from this report is that some subset of the 600 egress-caused deaths in the US each year occurs in midrise buildings with inadequate egress capacity.

At first blush, residential fire is a very minor cause of death in the US, and as such our money might better be spent addressing larger causes. It may even be that there are literally no deaths due to egress in new housing stock. What a huge victory that would be for our built environment! WOULDN'T IT BE GREAT TO HAVE SOME DATA ON THIS? I'm literally flummoxed that a well-sourced and sliced study isn't easily available.

All of that being said, there are a few reasons that I am strongly in favor of keeping the current standard:

First, we don't know what the fatality rate is per fire that occurs in midrise buildings with one egress. If it's higher than dual+ egress buildings and we remove the requirement we will likely suffer more deaths. And we shouldn't do that knowingly.

Second, fire is a nasty way for humans to die, and one that is particularly feared in nearly every culture. As such, we have collectively decided to invest in designing to a higher safety factor for these dangers & I don't see any compelling reason to erode that factor just to help developers meet their pro forma more easily in our search for increased density.

Third, I think it's a dangerous precedent to roll back safety regulations based on the whole "well other countries aren't as stringent" canard. The United States is the goddamned richest country in the history of the world; if we start saying "be less safe" given our nearly limitless resources, we should just pack this country in as a going concern.

Finally, and this is entirely anecdotal: I've known and worked with far too many unscrupulous developers to think this will end well. As Larry David Syndrome stated more eloquently above, these regulations are always written on the back of past mistakes.
posted by turbowombat at 8:00 PM on December 31, 2021 [7 favorites]


The other nice thing about the Kruschyova model is that your neighbor's apartment can absolutely be taken out by tank shelling and you wouldn't know unless you looked outside.

Which I guess is another example of writing code to mitigate the biggest cultural fear.
posted by turbowombat at 8:03 PM on December 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


Besides fire, what if someone nasty is waiting for you at the only exit to your building
- an abusive ex perhaps. There's lots of good reasons not to just have one exit.
posted by freethefeet at 8:08 PM on December 31, 2021 [11 favorites]


Fires are more dangerous in dense places. There's a reason dense cities have been where fire safety innovations originate.

This may have been true historically, but it is not true now. Your highest risk to die in a structure fire is in a rural area or small town, not in a dense city.
posted by ssg at 8:37 PM on December 31, 2021


Too bad Kubrick isn’t still around to make

'Dr. Strangelove II or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Automobile.'


Don't be cheeky. If you aren't interested in relaxing parking requirements, you aren't interested in actually limiting the stranglehold the automobile has had on city planning. And if you're one of those who insist on just banning automobiles, you aren't serious, either. I wish people would abandon this kind of nonsense and engage with the real world.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:45 PM on December 31, 2021 [2 favorites]


Building codes are written in three different colors of ink: blood, racism, and classism.
posted by aramaic at 9:35 PM on December 31, 2021 [11 favorites]


Don’t use Seattle’s 5-over-1 buildings as strong evidence until we’ve seen how they get through bust decades. None of them are very old and all of them can demand high rents and therefore afford maintenance, but that’s not due to the building design.

(I think Seattle’s Shoup parking fees do make a difference in car use, or at least did before COVID made the bus system worse.)
posted by clew at 10:09 PM on December 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


the Kyoto Animation fire, where someone spread gasoline at the sole street entrance and the only other escape was an open stairway to the roof.

It wasn’t open in the sense that it was unlocked and had a normal-opening door (last I heard it wasn’t clear which was the problem.) Over half the victims may have survived if it were.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:15 PM on December 31, 2021


I meant open in the sense that it was not a protected fire stairway, so that the smoke of course gathered at the top where they were trying to escape. In a proper fire stairway, not only do you exit to the street, you are protected from both smoke and fire for as long as the place is physically intact at all.
posted by tavella at 10:29 PM on December 31, 2021


A common model for double / triple-storey blocks of flats in the part of South Africa where I live is a ring around a central courtyard, with internal stairwells leading to front doors, and smaller external stairwells leading to back doors (possibly with porches). Both I and my parents live in blocks like this right now. But both blocks were built in the 1940s, and I'm not sure if I can think of more modern examples (I think newer blocks with the same numbers of storeys may be missing the back exits). I've never paid a lot of attention to this before, but I'm going to keep noticing it now!
posted by confluency at 10:45 PM on December 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


What goes on in the central courtyard? (They look like they should be delightful, but I’ve never lived in a city with many. )
posted by clew at 11:09 PM on December 31, 2021


My central courtyard is very utilitarian -- it contains the block's garbage and recycling bins, and a lawn with a lot of very useful washing lines and a gigantic useless non-native palm tree which will be a major headache for a future Body Corporate.

(South Africa doesn't do tumble dryers, so the washing lines are very popular. A non-resident owner on the BC has tried to get rid of them because she thinks they look tacky when she shows potential tenants around; she can have them when she pries them from my cold dead hands.)
posted by confluency at 12:31 AM on January 1, 2022 [4 favorites]


I live in a neighbourhood with a several central courtyards surrounded (more or less) with 2-3 story townhomes. The courtyards don't have automobile access and are mostly grass and so become prime child play spaces. Which creates a socialization space for all residents. [as an aside in my jurisdiction it is illegal to impose restrictions on laundry lines. I don't remember seeing any permanent ones in use but a) the courtyards are mostly out of sight of the road ways and b) it's likely at least some residents are using portable lines for drying].

We also have many 2-3 story single fronted apartment buildings with external stairs accessed by connected balconies (think of external stair two story motel but with walk ways at least twice as deep so there is dedicated space in front of each unit for exclusive use). Those building's units have exposures on two sides allowing for cross ventilation etc.

The Treehugger link lays out the major fire safety difference between Europe and Canada that makes single vs. double stairwells difficult to compare. Specifically that the European buildings are of either heavy timber or concrete (floors at least) construction. A 4-6 story apartment building in Canada is likely to be of light wood framing. I bet that all else being equal a 4-6 story concrete platform building with a single stair well would be more expensive than the light wood framed building with two stair wells which would negate the developer incentive to build those buildings if we built them the same as Europe.

It also talks about fire response teams providing a "second" egress. I guess that would work with good response time but that is also going to cost a lot of money. Right now the fire department in my city only meets their 7.5 minute target response time 78% of the time. 7.5 minutes is a huge delay on a light wood framed building. I sure as hell wouldn't be wanting to be waiting 8, 10 or more minutes on my six floor balcony for a ladder to reach me while a fire rages in the single stairwell. I'm kind of curious how fast a fire department in Berlin can clear a six story building of occupants if the stairwell is unusable. Even if a truck gets there in a few minutes it must take quite a bit of time to reposition the ladder at each unit especially if not all units are accessible from one side. aAnd then getting people with mobility problems down a ladder must be complicated. Someone like say my father who for the last few years of his life was 150 kilos and could only walk a few steps.Climbing over a window sill or railing would have been impossible for him.

Even if you only required a single 6 story ladder truck at the local fire hall that's 1-3 million for the truck purchase plus the costs of another crew and likely a building renovation to handle the larger truck. Not that bad when spread over ten city blocks of apartment buildings but quite the cost to absorb on a single 6 story single family lot building. So I bet what happens is that expense is deferred until the number of these single stair buildings meets a threshold which may or may not be cut from future budgets by either raising the threshold or just not complying. The building those vehicles would service will still be around for a hundred years though.

Any of the single story designs linked could easily be built with two independent stair cases (with one exiting out the back and one out the front) next to each other. Scissors are legal if a little weird in Canada but there are also other options that aren't as space effiecent. That'll bring down the plate efficiency to the range of double fronted hallway building but you gain all the cross breezy, variable layout, Passivhaus capable designs that the single stair systems enable. That's a much more complicated design though and therefor more expensive so of course that isn't the option builders settle on.

By definition, there are only three possibilities -- Canadians are scofflaw anarchists that can't be trusted with a toaster oven (in which case the difference in regulations is sensible), or Seattle and Berlin are chockablock with incredibly unsafe housing (since their regulations are so lax), or the Canadian regulations are overconservative.

Or there are other things that make this a more nuanced comparison.

I'm really skeptical of fireany safety that requires perfect attention to detailing during design, installation, and maintenance. Grenfell of course is the most egregious example of that failing but there were at least half a dozen buildings that had similar fires before the Grenfell fire and the risks caused by poor installation and maintenance had been well enumerated in Grenfell's case specifically before the fire.

Here in BC we're just pulling ourselves out of another "building innovation via standards roll back" disaster; the leaky condo crisis that caused the failure of hundreds of building exteriors (practically all the buildings of that type constructed during the period) resulting in as a major public inquiry concluded: "a litany of horrific experiences, personal tragedies, and dashed dreams" endured by homeowners. And unlike the leaky condos which presented easily visible problems (like the cladding of the building falling off) the dangerous buildings wouldn't be noticed until they killed people in multiple fires and there wouldn't be the existence of tarps over the windows to drive strata boards to actually fix the problems identified. Hardly a stretch to think members of those boards, especially absentee landlords, would vote against a large short term levy to increase long term safety. It's certainly the case that they make that decision all the time when it comes to electrical safety (deferring the replacement of equipment that not only isn't up to modern code but is also straight up dangerous as installed). And it is so easy for a running change during construction (maybe as the result of supply chain interruption related to a global pandemic) to result in disaster. See for example what seemed an innocuous change that resulted in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse which killed 114 and injured 216.

I didn't see anywhere a count of how many Seattle properties take advantage of the single stair allowance. I like to know there are several hundred of these buildings in Seattle of which at least a couple have had major structural fires before I tried to draw any data from the allowance. If these buildings are so much better than the alternatives and the allowance has existed since at least 2003 they should number in the hundreds easily. Are these buildings common there?
posted by Mitheral at 1:39 AM on January 1, 2022 [7 favorites]


Don't be cheeky. If you aren't interested in relaxing parking requirements, you aren't interested in actually limiting the stranglehold the automobile has had on city planning. And if you're one of those who insist on just banning automobiles, you aren't serious, either. I wish people would abandon this kind of nonsense and engage with the real world.

Tl;dr - across income and space there is a strong sense of entitlement to park paces from the front door that complicates things here.

I was also a big relaxer, but there is a horrible space between no dedicated parking and a refusal to use distant curb parking that I’ll call “get off my (your) lawn”. Businesses can try to get by without dedicated parking and I think that mostly works. But housing is another story where I live now.

I have lived in parts of major cities where density was king and transport was good and so we didn’t own a car. In other slightly lesser densities we didn’t think it was odd to park blocks away from our dwelling or the restaurant, etc.

I now live in a place where transport is meh and density is growing. People park in the space in front of dwellings or businesses between the structure and the sidewalk, and on the sidewalks themselves. Parking is destroying every scrap of semi-permeable surface in these situations.

If you paved it all these still wouldn’t be proper parking (and more water gets dumped into sewers). People park directly across the front door exits of multi family dwellings, which can’t be good for the main topic of this thread. One must drive on the sidewalks to get to some of these spots.

I get it that people in every income level need cars in this world. I also see that legal curb parking can be found a block away. I have family that got handicapped reserves on the curb so that can be done.

I also want to stress that bike lanes are not part of any of this and they are not the enemy. But when one is put on the table, the chance that a person might need to walk any distance to a car brings loud and ugly resistance.
posted by drowsy at 7:54 AM on January 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


Edit above… the bike lane sentence was there to round things out and to bring large single units in line with crowded multis. The entitlement is universal.
posted by drowsy at 8:05 AM on January 1, 2022


Having had parking policy enforcement for my condo board dumped on me; and having seen people’s reactions at universities I’ve attended, at my workplace, and on my town’s Facebook page to suggestions to remove very small numbers of not-designated-accessible parking spaces directly in front of where people want to go, or to raise parking fees: if people directed the level of anger and overall give-a-f**& to health and safety issues, global warming, economic inequality, or other things that are actually major problems affecting billions of humans, we would be living in a utopian world by now. I love driving - the freedom it gives me in North America, and just the physical act of driving (modulo traffic; traffic is still frustrating) - but the way some people are about parking, I’d give up my car if that would mean everyone who didn’t have valid mobility reasons also had to give up their vehicles and their parking spaces.
posted by eviemath at 8:37 AM on January 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'd like to add that even though I staked out an oppositional position to single egress upthread, this is an interesting topic of discussion and a good FPP, so thanks for posting metaquarry. As with the recent MetaTalk on FPPs, it's possible to disagree with the thrust of a posting while still appreciating the thought and effort put into it and the opportunity to engage with the topic it provides.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 9:18 AM on January 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


> or the Canadian regulations are overconservative.

According to my father in law, all those new towers in Vancouver are fucked come the big earthquake which the geologists have been telling us to expect and prepare for.

They're built just strong enough that they won't fall down, but they will still receive enough damage that they won't be inhabitable afterwards.
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:08 AM on January 1, 2022


They're built just strong enough that they won't fall down, but they will still receive enough damage that they won't be inhabitable afterwards.

so... they're a good jobs program? what better way to kickstart the local economy after a disaster than to have to build all new housing! (#neoliberalhottakes)
posted by turbowombat at 10:32 AM on January 1, 2022


The upcoming quake could be a 9+. Hard to imagine any building not needing at least a little fix up after that.
posted by Mitheral at 6:05 PM on January 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


I currently live in a detached house. More than once, UPS or Fed Ex has dropped a large package on my small porch, right in front of the door. Which, more than once, made it impossible for me to open my front door. I literally had to go out the back door, go around, move the package, and then open the front door.

I contacted the town and asked if there were any ordinances forbidding BLOCKING DAMN DOORS WITH PACKAGES, and in fact there were not; it is apparently common sense that does not need to be legislated. I asked, what happens when an elderly person in a house with only one door has UPS drop a package in front of the door that's too heavy for them to move by pushing on the door? They said, Well, I guess they call someone or something. I called the delivery services to complain, and they acted like I was literally insane. It seemed SO DANGEROUS, and nobody seemed to care at all!

Anyway, I can absolutely be convinced that three flats/converted houses/small apartment buildings should be allowed to have "less-serious" fire escapes -- a lot of 1880s mansions in Peoria had been converted to (three-story) apartments after WWII and had fire escapes (usually back-porch-balcony-style, like Chicago three-flats, that were intended as balconies and fire escapes and sleeping porches all at once) that would not meet code for a modern three-story apartment). But I'm not sure I can be convinced that a single exit is a good idea for any building, including a detached house.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:00 PM on January 1, 2022 [4 favorites]


I've had this happen too. Tall flat package that fit between door and storm door but prevented the lever handle on the door from rotating enough to disengage.
posted by Mitheral at 9:26 PM on January 1, 2022


The upcoming quake could be a 9+. Hard to imagine any building not needing at least a little fix up after that.

First, you are correct.

Second, you are wrong. I have been involved in the design of a building that aims to withstand a literal multiple of the Maximum Credible Earthquake (MCE, in the literature, with a few variant acro/back-ronyms because nothing means anything now).

...that specific building was commissioned by an organization with an outsized view of its importance and monopoly money to play with but we expected a 9+ earthquake to pass without notable impact to their "services". As in literally "oh, did something happen just now?"

Now, the fact that a 9+ event would mean nobody would give a shit about them was a bit of an outside context problem.

... which is why you're right.
posted by aramaic at 10:49 PM on January 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


Thanks for posting this! I didn't realize that the second-exit requirement is why apartment buildings in Canada have long hotel-like corridors with apartments on each side ("double-loaded"), connecting two stairwells, as opposed to the single-stairwell design illustrated in the Atomic Blonde fight scene.

Author's note from the secondegress.ca website - Speckert grew up in Switzerland, where single-stairwell designs are common.
I would like to end with this self-portrait, which is to say that this is a deeply personal project for me. I grew up in a three-storey, single egress apartment building where we knew our neighbours well, the stair landings were generous and naturally-lit, and everyone got pretty crazy with their Christmas decorations. My childhood home in Switzerland reminds me that stairs should be about more than just circulation and fire safety, and that there is a sensuality to them too - the tactile sensation of a winding guardrail, the slip-resistance of the treads, the wash of light from a skylight or the breeze from an operable window. Especially in an apartment building stairwell, a small lightwell goes a long way to maintaining a visual and acoustic connection between floors and therefore, between neighbours.

I consider it ridiculous and borderline offensive that the building code in Canada considers buildings like the home I was raised in to be unsafe.
But Mitheral raises an excellent point: are wood-framed buildings (typical in Vancouver and Seattle for up to six storeys) going to be safe? Looking at the BC fire safety requirements, it looks like the relevant section is 3.2.2.50: a building of up to six storeys which is of combustible construction (presumably meaning wood) is required to be sprinklered throughout, and floor assemblies are required to be fire separations with a fire-resistance rating of at least one hour.

Canadians tend to be small-c conservative, so my guess is that it'll be difficult to make this kind of change. Probably people in Vancouver will want to see what Seattle's experience is like.
posted by russilwvong at 1:02 PM on January 2, 2022


I'd much rather live in a sprinklered small urban building with one exit than a non-sprinklered building with two exits. Death rates in sprinklered homes are almost an order of magnitude lower than in non-sprinklered buildings.

In BC today, you can build a wood-framed multi unit building up to three stories without sprinklers, as long as each unit has two exits (or one exit per unit if they each have a ground floor exit to outside and aren't more than two stories tall). But you can't build a sprinklered stacked triplex with one exit and a fire escape on the back. That seems pretty backwards. The sprinklered stacked triplex is definitely safer.
posted by ssg at 1:45 PM on January 2, 2022


Thanks ssg, that's a great summary of data on sprinkler systems.

Anyone here in Seattle, the one North American jurisdiction which allows single-stairwell apartment buildings up to six storeys? Do people actually build apartment buildings like this?
posted by russilwvong at 11:03 AM on January 3, 2022


Lots of us, russilwvong, probably some of us living in the relatively new apartment designs. What worries me is that we started building a *lot* of them all at once, and none of them have survived an economic bust yet, and it's a design that seems to expect regular maintenance, and during busts that doesn't happen and I'm kind of worried about a bunch of housing burning down when we're collectively broke. Happened in the 1980s and 1990s to buildings rewired with a terrible 1960s code.

Someone from Chicago, I think, mentioned that Chicago is not going to allow these because they went through *two* periods of cheap apartment buildings burning down.
posted by clew at 3:47 PM on January 3, 2022


Thanks, clew. Do you know what the story is with why Seattle decided to allow the single-stairwell design, when nobody else in North America does?

Other than fire safety (which is obviously a big question), what's your experience living in one of these buildings?
posted by russilwvong at 6:53 PM on January 3, 2022


We’re in the second, maybe third decade of a building boom and housing prices keep going up and it’s easy to sell Doug fir use to our legislatures. Other than that, I expect the arguments made in the OP. I don’t think they’re bad arguments, I just think they rely on more conscientiousness than the US nurtures.

I don’t live in one. Friend of mine moved into one - I think - in 2020. I haven’t visited yet. Mostly what I hear is that it’s so new!
posted by clew at 10:40 PM on January 3, 2022


Last night 12 people died in a duplex rowhouse fire in Philadelphia. That was with two exits though probably only one stair. It sounds like the family on the first floor got out, and the family on the upper floors did not, but they're still trying to determine what happened. The fire department arrived 4 minutes after the first of 36 911 calls.

Sure, it was an old (brick and plaster) building that wasn't sprinklered and there are questions about the smoke detectors, but I have trouble believing that won't be the case for some neglected apartment buildings of the future. This building was inspected in April.

The author's childhood staircase sounds like great architecture but I don't see how it was improved by the lack of a second stair.
posted by sepviva at 7:06 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Thanks, sepviva. Associated Press story.
posted by russilwvong at 10:56 PM on January 5, 2022


be the case for some neglected apartment buildings of the future.

Yup. And a second exit is the safety precaution you can see and control. You can't tell if your shitty slumlord is maintaining the sprinklers, you can't control if your city has been taken over by anti-tax lunatics and the fire department no longer has the funding for those 5 story ladders as second exit. If the landlord has chained up the exit, *that* you know about and can possibly do something about.

Basically it's privileged guys simping for the construction industry, secure in the knowledge that *they* will never be scraping by in one of these cheap-out buildings as a poor person 50 years later.
posted by tavella at 8:49 AM on January 6, 2022


I don't disagree with your general point about being able to verify a second exit (though will note you can also verify fire escapes and exits that don't qualify as exits).

But lots of people live in and want to live in converted rowhouses, stacked triplexes, and so on. People like to live in dense neighbourhoods! People like living in housing that isn't a huge apartment building or a single family home! I've lived in one, with a fire escape but no second exit, and chances are very good that the author, since he's a McGill student, has lived in one too. To suggest that anyone who holds these opinions is some sort of privileged person who wants substandard housing for the lower classes is ridiculous and insulting.
posted by ssg at 3:56 PM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


Michael Eliason has written up a report advocating single-stair buildings for the city of Vancouver.
The City of Vancouver is unique in British Columbia, in that it has the authority to adopt its own Building By-Laws. A code modification would be needed for this form of development as it is a departure from what is presently allowed. This change should be made in conjunction with fire officials, and we believe there
could be interest in discussions at the Federal or Provincial level for facilitating these changes.

After discussion with Conrad Speckert and others, we recommend an incremental approach to legalizing
Point Access Blocks, allowing up to three or four storeys.
Three-storey townhouses with a single stair are legal in Vancouver (in fact we live in one).
posted by russilwvong at 11:20 PM on January 6, 2022


No no, I think arguing that *larger new construction* doesn't need to include second exits is based on a desire for profit and disregard for safety. I'm all for existing building conversions and prefer to live in them myself.
posted by sepviva at 9:17 AM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


based on a desire for profit and disregard for safety

This is the appeal to motive, right? Can we focus less on people's imagined motives, and more on whether this is a good idea or not on its merits?
posted by russilwvong at 9:31 AM on January 7, 2022


The people pointing out the dangers of relaxing these restrictions are trying to discuss the idea on all its merits, not just the ones that operate for the first decade. I've just read through a bunch of the links in the OP and found nothing discussing the problems the US and UK have had with this. So that's demonstrably *ignoring* the safety problems, no matter what the mentality behind it is.
posted by clew at 1:27 PM on January 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


I've just read through a bunch of the links in the OP and found nothing discussing the problems the US and UK have had with this.

I thought this comparison of jurisdictions was pretty good.
posted by russilwvong at 7:03 PM on January 7, 2022


Can we focus less on people's imagined motives, and more on whether this is a good idea or not on its merits?

The profit motive makes it highly likely that building maintenance will not be adequate in the long run, and/or that corners will be cut during construction and shoddy materials will be used, which means the specific instantiation of the idea will likely be more dangerous in the long run. That is an argument on its merits.

Building codes have context; the “merit” of any particular idea about building codes is thus context dependent. In addition to this example, it should be abundantly clear as another example that the wide variety of environments in which humans live around the world makes one single building code insufficient - no construction technique or architectural style will be equally good in all circumstances.
posted by eviemath at 9:19 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Fire in the Bronx today. At least 19 people have died.

"Firefighters arrived on site three minutes after the initial fire call and were met with fire in the hallway of the building.

Victims were found in the stairwells, according to the commissioner, as smoke extended the height of the building."
posted by sepviva at 3:00 PM on January 9, 2022


Commissioner Nigro said the door to the apartment where the fire started was left open, which helped fuel the fire and allowed the smoke to spread. “We’ve spread the word, ‘close the door, close the door’” to keep a fire contained, he said.

I wonder whether double-stair buildings actually make it harder to contain a fire once it is out in a hallway, as there is an additional route for the flames and smoke to spread internally through the building. It could be that double-stair buildings are safer if the fire is discovered sooner but more dangerous if it's discovered later. Wonder if there have been computer simulations run to test this.
posted by Panthalassa at 3:57 PM on January 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


To count as two sets of egress, they need to be separate. And yes the building code people and testing agencies study and model this stuff extensively.

Building code related to egress (at least the IBC) is mostly about getting people out quickly. It's not just the number of staircases, but there are calculations for width and length of an egress path based on the number of people. If you have sprinklers or more fire resistant construction or better smoke protection that is factored in but only because it buys you a little more time. They aren't substitutes for an exit.
posted by sepviva at 7:38 AM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


The Guardian reports that the spread of smoke in the Bronx fire may have been due to an auto closing door not working, which is (if correct) great anecdotal evidence of my point upthread- A building may be safe as it is engineered, but how it performs under real world conditions when invariably some of the systems are broken/bypassed etc is another thing entirely. Multiple egress most likely allows more safe margin of error in these scenarios.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 11:41 AM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


To count as two sets of egress, they need to be separate.

Hang on, I thought the canonical design for a double-stair was the double-loaded corridor. Doesn't that basically have the two exits on either end of a long corridor? Aren't they connected in that way? Or do I have something backwards?
posted by Panthalassa at 7:38 PM on January 10, 2022


With fire doors separating the corridor from both sets of stairs, not just having the hallway open on both ends.
posted by eviemath at 7:56 PM on January 10, 2022


But there’s also a popular style in the mid-Atlantic region (also seen farther up the coast and into Canada, though less frequently) of two-level 4-plex (sometimes taller but still pairs of side-by-side apartments on each level) with a main front stair that opens to the living rooms in each apartment directly off of the landing on each floor, with a small back stair (kind of like a servant’s stair, though such buildings were usually built for small families that would have only maybe had a cleaning service come in once a week or so, if anything) off of the kitchen. A variation I’ve seen has four units off of each landing of the main stair, with pairs of units each sharing a side tiny narrow alternate stairway. Typically these back stairs would go down to the basement, while the main stair wouldn’t.
posted by eviemath at 8:08 PM on January 10, 2022


Yeah I mean even with fire doors, a second internal egress is still an additional point of failure isn't it? Making it roughly twice as likely for a fire to escape, all else being equal.
posted by Panthalassa at 8:45 PM on January 10, 2022


Not to mention, double the number of fire doors, stairs etc that need to be maintained. Double the expenditure. Seems like a massive liability, actually, when buildings aren't being resourced properly.
posted by Panthalassa at 9:30 PM on January 10, 2022


Well when you put it that way, why do we even bother living in buildings, with all the potential failure points and hazards they entail.
posted by eviemath at 11:19 PM on January 10, 2022


Jeez. You're the one who suggested 'the profit motive makes it highly likely that building maintenance will not be adequate in the long run' weighed against designs with single internal egress. All I'm pointing out is that when you double the stairs, you double the maintenance required. I don't think it's really the place for a slippery slope argument.
posted by Panthalassa at 2:25 AM on January 11, 2022


NYT

The 17 people killed in a Bronx fire this week all died from inhaling smoke that poured through a single malfunctioning door and billowed to the top of the 19-story building ...

But it was deadly smoke sucked into an internal stairwell, not flames, that overcame residents as they fled the building.

As the fire burned, the smoke was drawn through the broken door on the third floor toward an open stairwell door high above on the 15th floor. ...

In the end, the commissioner said, people would have been safest if they had stayed in their apartments themselves, rather than seeking to evacuate.

City officials have not yet said where residents died in the building, but residents and their family members suggested in interviews that the stairwells had proved particularly lethal.

posted by Panthalassa at 2:47 AM on January 11, 2022


Your last post kind of disproves your point. Had there been a second stair, people could have used a non-smoke-filled one. Lack of maintenance means that some things will fail, not that everything will fail all at the same time. If some things will fail, it’s better to have a backup for any critical infrastructure than not have a backup. This is not a complicated argument. Try responding in good faith next time if you’d prefer non-snarky replies.
posted by eviemath at 5:52 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


An article in Slate has the floor plans for the Twin Parks North West building. The Bronx Building That Burned Was Supposed to Be Affordable Housing Done Right. It uses a scissor-stair design:
Afterward, the Cornell sociologist Franklin Becker surveyed all the residents about the results and found that the best responses for an urban project came from Twin Parks North West, Site 4—by Prentice & Chan, Olhausen—in part because they had a single, guarded entrance lobby. (Two means of egress via a scissor stair, though.)
A couple articles about the architecture and design of the Twin Parks affordable-housing project in Brooklyn, from 2013 and 2017, discussing the issues of aging and decline. posted by russilwvong at 4:23 PM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


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