Architect Simon Ha was trying to squeeze an apartment building onto a 6,400-square foot lot in Hollywood.
The city of Los Angeles requires two stairways for such buildings, which limited the configurations Ha could use. After racking his brain, he finally came up with a solution.
“It was like designing a Swiss watch,” he said of the 2023 project.
Now, the L.A. City Council is on the brink of allowing just one stairway for buildings of up to six stories, making it easier and cheaper to build on smaller lots — but raising concerns about escape routes in a fire or earthquake.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who introduced the single stairway proposal with Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, said she wants to speed up development to address the city’s housing crisis and to encourage the construction of apartments big enough for families. And she believes safety needn’t be sacrificed.
“We’re trying to say, ‘How can we build more safely — and build more overall?’” Raman said in an interview.
Until recently, New York, Seattle and Honolulu were among the few American cities that allowed single stairways in buildings of up to six stories. Since 2022, amid a nationwide affordable housing crunch, at least 16 cities and states have proposed or enacted single stairway regulations, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study released in February.
The double stairway rule, in place in California since 1981, makes it harder to build apartments with more than two bedrooms, urban planners and architects said.
Apartments typically have to be laid out along a long hallway, with windows on only one side of each unit, resulting in less light and ventilation, said Stephen Smith, who is executive director of the Center for Building in North America and one of the single stairway’s biggest advocates.
“For small lots in particular, the second stairway can eat up a huge amount of the building’s footprint,” he said.
Under state law, L.A. can reduce the number of stairways it requires, as long as it implements other restrictions, such as high-end sprinkler systems. Raman and Yaroslavsky’s proposal for single stairway buildings would limit the number of units per floor to four.
But proponents of double stairways say they are a key safety measure, giving residents two options for fleeing a fire, along with a separate route for firefighters.
Frank Lima, a Los Angeles firefighter and general secretary-treasurer of the International Assn. of Fire Fighters, or IAFF, said the stairways are a life-and-death issue.
“[A single stairway] forces building occupants to go down a stairwell while firefighters go up a stairwell,” Lima said. “That delays fire attack, delays people getting out of a building — when seconds count.”
“When you try to cut corners to save money or make more units, it shouldn’t be at the price of children that die,” Lima said.
The IAFF, which represents firefighters and emergency medical technicians across the U.S. and Canada, has strongly opposed single stairway proposals — “I’d rather call it ‘only one way out,’” Lima said.
On Aug. 20, the City Council voted 13 to 1 to request that city staffers draft a single stairway ordinance.
In a memo to the council, City Planning Director Vincent Bertoni wrote that the single stairway proposal could make a “substantial contribution” to the city’s housing supply.
“The result is that family-sized units — a much needed segment of Los Angeles’ housing stock — are not being produced at the scale required to meet existing and projected needs,” he wrote of the double stairway requirement.
About 14% of rental units in the city are three or more bedrooms, according to the Planning Department.
Zachary Pitts, the Los Angeles director of YIMBY Action, which advocates for more affordable housing, said he had a hard time finding a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Los Angeles.
There were plenty of studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms, but places big enough for his family of four cost a small fortune.
“We ended up buying a single-family home, since a mortgage was lower than the prices we were being quoted,” Pitts said.
Ha, the architect, said that ditching the double stairway requirement could enable developers to produce “East Coast-style” townhouses like those in New York — a contrast to the “podium-style” buildings now going up in L.A., which generally take up a half or whole block.
Ha has designed buildings from San Francisco to San Diego, though most of his work is in Los Angeles, where he is the architect of many micro-apartment complexes, which contain only studios.
Small parcels of 7,500 square feet or less, where a single stairway would make apartments easier to build, often sit empty for long periods, creating “missing teeth” in the city’s layout, Ha said.
The Los Angeles Fire Department declined to comment on the single stairway proposal, saying it is under review by the city fire marshal. The councilmembers behind the proposal say the department has been consulted every step of the way.
Raman said she sees “no reduction in fire safety.”
“New fire safety standards in our building code have made it so new buildings are much safer overall,” she said.
The Pew Charitable Trusts study, co-written and researched by Smith of the Center for Building in North America, found that in New York, the rate of fire deaths in single stairway buildings was the same as in other residential buildings.
“This [double stairway] code originates from when people were cooking with open flames, when there were no sprinklers or fire alarms,” Smith said.
City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian voted yes on the Aug. 20 motion to draft a single stairway ordinance, though he had previously expressed reservations about earthquake safety.
Seattle has single stairways but “less than one-tenth the number of seismic activity we have in our region,” he said during a council meeting.
Councilmember Traci Park was the lone no vote.
“Generally in life, when you have more exits and evacuation routes, things are generally more safe,” she said.
The post Could apartments with only one stairway be a solution to L.A.’s housing crisis? appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
