Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you plan to make the fires smaller as well?
Copy paste from Europe, where they are about half the size?
B-b-b-b-but bUY amERiCa
The case for single-stair multifamily
531–540 of 562 posts
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, which regulations? The entire article is on the prohibition of single stair multi-family residential. > I'm not sure we need more high-end development - those tenants have plenty of options. This is silly. When car makers couldn't make enough cars in 2021 and the price went up, was the solution to ban making new cars? Should we have prohibited making cars with fancy trim? Having enough housing for everyone is…
Cities have seen plenty of high-end housing built (afaik), and yet there is still a lack of affordable housing. Building more expensive homes doesn't seem to increase availability of affordable ones. The idea that it would seems to be another 'trickle-down economics' theory, the one from the 1980s that if we help the wealthy get wealthier, the benefits will 'trickle-down' (turns out, only the first step worked). Reas…
> Cities have seen plenty of high-end housing built (afaik), and yet there is still a lack of affordable housing.
They permit office space for more workers than bedrooms. A big clue: pandemic aside, commutes get longer every year.
> The idea that it would seems to be another 'trickle-down economics' theory, the one from the 1980s that if we help the wealthy get wealthier, the benefits will 'trickle-down' (turns out, only the first step worked). Reasonably, wealthy people don't see poor housing as an option, though there is gentrification.
I see you're versed in the left-NIMBY lingo. No, 'trickle down economics' was an excuse for the wealthy to pay lower taxes. When fancy new housing is built, the property taxes are higher.
> Making expensive cars wouldn't seem to result in many more affordable ones.
I think you're intentionally missing the point. The price came down when more cars could be manufactured.
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
You already have shanty towns with all the regulation. Making housing cheaper also means making higher quality housing cheaper.
We don't really have shanty towns in the states. We definitely don't have a Kowloon Walled City, which is an example of what can happen when no regulations are involved (and somewhat remarkably not burn down and kind of thrive even if still a slum). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
Eh, Skid Row is pretty famous, but if you're willing to broaden the definition a little the US has lots of slums [0].
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/more-am...
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#534Looking from the outside I would guess this is one of the big reasons for the "missing middle" [1] (lack of medium-density housing) in most North American cities. It is simply not economically feasible to build a small to medium size multi-unit building if you need to include two stairwells, so all buildings are either single family houses or huge mega projects. In my country the simple and cheap four-story walk-up c…
No elevator would be a no-no here. What if you were in a wheelchair?
Three-story walk-ups are common and legal in America, if that is where
"Here" is for you. If you are in a wheelchair, you rent a ground floor unit.
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reason five over ones are popular in the US has nothing to do with staircase requirements. The reason is money, like always. Yes it is money. More staircases remarkably increase the costs of buildings. Single stairway, cheaper buildings, more profitable to do other sorts of buildings, more variety of buildings etc. (see also no parking mandates)
Stairs are not expensivei they take space, but are cheay otherwise
At least in larger construction, it's the pathway to the secondary stair that takes up an exorbitant amount of space, hamstrings the layout. Also, code compliant fire egress stairwells are surprisingly expensive to build, costs more than the unit cost of a living space.
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couch and a fire and that couch can't be pushed over or jumped over... That's quite a contrived scenario. I suspect that most of the improvements in the fire safety record of apartment buildings have to do with other factors like materials used, fireproof stair doors, etc etc. The reason I think the two stairs don't do much is that first world countries exist outside North America, they don't have this rule, and th…
> A couch and a fire and that couch can't be pushed over or jumped over. Not everyone is young and in shape to push couches or jump over them.
If you have mobility issues that prevent you from exiting your building easily then you can move somewhere else. We don’t need to make every apartment building in the country more expensive for this extremely specific scenario.
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
American here. I can't even put to words my embafflement upon learning that 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in Europe in 2017.
That had little to do with stairs, but it was caused by the use of inappropriate combustible materials, which were forbidden for buildings of that height in many countries of continental Europe, but they were allowed in Great Britain were regulations were much more lax. So that event is strictly specific to UK and not representative for Europe in general.
The materials were also forbidden in the UK, but the enforcement of the regulations was very poor.
(The materials are produced for use on 1-2 storey buildings, which is fine.)
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#538That article gave an example of a "typical European floorplan". It did have multiple stairs they were just not normally accessible from all apartments. If you had some emergency-only provision to enter your neighbor's apartment and then bust their wall to access the apartment behind it, more than one egress would be possible. Some emergency doors where an alarm would sound perhaps? I come up with all kinds of problem…
Part of the fire safety of the European design will be containment: firewalls between the apartments, which would be compromised by emergency doors.
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
And more generally move zoning to a nuisance basis (as in Japan or Europe), euclidian exclusionary zoning is a root cause of suburbian sprawl and dead areas. That means local shops can pop up, and city centers are able to progressively transition upwards at the edges (and plots can be upzoned) instead of having a sea of low-density housing suddenly becoming a bunch of skyscrapers.
Zoning is already on the nuisance basis in many places in the US. It means local shops cannot pop up in residential neighborhoods if nobody wants to live near such a shop. If residents are fine with traffic, noise and pests they can vote for changing zoning on any lot to commercial. High density residential is almost the same, except there are also physical limitations of the infrastructure.
That's specifically not what nuisance basis means. That's exclusionary zoning, and the co-morbid NIMBY-ism.
In a nuisance basis zoning system, an area would not be zoned like that, a business would only be forbidden if it exceeded the nuisance level for the zone.
So in most areas, small stores and restaurants are allowed, because they are low-nuisance businesses. Even in very low nuisance areas, businesses traditionally run out of homes (e.g. very small offices, some forms of medical services, small shops, very small convenience stores / corner shops) could not be forbidden.
Commercial zoning would be for "disruptive" commerces due to traffic, noise, space requirements, sight, ...
Re: The case for single-stair multifamily
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
More about Tokyo new units here: https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/361409_dcd56370... Title = How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing TL;DR: Since 1995 (yes, during the lost decade) they are building ~150k new "dwellings" per year. Wow.
How many are they tearing down to rebuild? Buildings only last ~20-30 years in Japan, so a lot of those are just replacing something that was torn down.
> Buildings only last ~20-30 years in Japan
This is a myth in central Tokyo.