20 A I R S t u d i o
B C B U S I N E S S . C A
J U N E 2 0 24
by Frances Bula
Frances Bula is a longtime
Vancouver journalist and
the 2023 recipient of the
Bruce Hutchison Lifetime
Achievement Award from the
Jack Webster Foundation.
ing codes to allow that kind
of design again for lower-rise
apartment buildings. They
will talk at length about how
this will make building design
so much more flexible—and
therefore better—because
architects won't be locked into
having to line up apartments
with windows on only one side
against that central corridor.
It will provide for more living
space inside any given building
where the point-stair exit is
allowed and make them more
affordable, they say. (That last
one is debatable.) Yes, you will
feel like you are being bom-
barded with incomprehensible
technology terms at times. But
the nerds are winning.
To the south, various cities
and even states are looking at
changing their codes to allow
smaller apartments to be built
again as single-exit buildings.
Seattle, which has permitted
them since 1977 in buildings
up to six storeys, with a max
of four apartments per floor, is
getting a lot of phone calls as
You've probably seen at
least one movie where some
of the action takes place in the
stairwell of a grand old apart-
ment building, a place with a
big central hallway and a stair-
case that spirals up that core.
Like Jack Lemmon's home in
the 1960 film The Apartment,
which wasn't meant to be
a documentary on housing
styles but currently serves
as one.
Those stairwells are illegal
in all of Canada and most of
the United States now.
Since at least 1941 in Canada,
longer in some American cities,
it's been the rule that every
apartment building has to have
two staircases for people to exit
in case of a fire. Which has led
to the ubiquitous floor plan we
now know—a long, window-
less hallway with apartments
lined up on either side and a
staircase at either end.
But things are changing! As
YIMBY activists in both coun-
tries have gone on a crusade to
reform a long list of problems
with housing construction
and supply (zoning restric-
tions,
NIMBY opposition that
kills projects, building-code
complications, lengthy permit-
ting times), one target they've
lavished a lot of love and
attention on is that staircase
requirement.
If you have a friend who's
a housing nerd, just say the
words "single-stair egress"
or "single-exit buildings" or
"point-stair exit" (different
groups prefer different terms)
and watch their eyes light up
and the words tumble out of
their mouths to explain all the
benefits of changing build-
1,000-YARD STAIR
The debate over changing stair restrictions in the
province and country is alive and well
L A N D V A L U E S
