Is this click bait?
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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The multiple references to 'fire safety organizations' read to me like 'fire departments'. Fire departments across North America already dictate what our roads (and therefore cities) look like. Seems like a logical leap they would also impose control over the corridors within buildings too.
I am 100% not convinced. It seems incredibly obvious that if you have a building that you can't jump the windows of, do want at least two avenues of escape in the event of a fire?. What moron is arguing otherwise? If you want to argue that then show me statistics.
Also fuck whoever created that website, a constant upward scrolling was awful.
I'm living in a 15 floor apartment building with a single stairwell. (Germany, the building is from 2015)
There's two elevators, one of them is equipped for firefighters (manual control possible after inserting the firefighters' key, windows)
The single escape stairwell is isolated from the rest of the house by double doors (kind of an airlock against smoke). The escape stairwell is isolated against smoke and fire.
Also on every floor there's a kind of glass cage in front of the elevators with a normally open door, in case of fire this will isolate the elevators against smoke.
In case of a fire alarm all the doors will automatically close (you can still open them. manually), additionally huge fans will be pulling clean air through the stairwell and the elevators.
We have individual fire alarms in every room - and a common system, connected to the fire department, in the shared areas.
So it's a "put all of your eggs into one basket, but have a damn good basket" concept.
Btw, I'm on 8th floor, so too high to jump and probably already out of reach of the FD's "extensible ladder" car.
Why ~~San Fransisco~~ developers can't build more housing. They take for granted that new housing needs to be profitable for developers. Public housing should also be in the conversation.
Public housing follows the same rules. This makes any multi-story building more expensive for everyone, and the rules need to be reformed regardless of who builds the building and regardless of their motivations.
It's true, it's still a bit more expensive to build, but the profit motive is removed. Public housing doesn't need to recoup its costs. People need housing, you build housing.
It's important for public projects to manage their costs as well, as it affects how much can be built using the limited public funds available. I think we can all agree that we need large amounts of public housing in constrained places like San Francisco, to alleviate the current situation.
It is in fact one of the major advantages of building public housing - you unlock the lower costs of building at scale, which reduces costs in several ways:
- Building the same type of units makes workers familiar with the product and allows them to complete them faster
- Pre-fabricated modular units can be constructed off-site and shipped in, and making them at scale drives costs down
- Large contracts are more lucrative and can hence be negotiated to better rates with contractors
For a wildly successful example, look to Miljonprogrammet that took place in Sweden during the 60s and 70s. Following that project, a vast supply of housing was available for the population, with housing costs below 1% of income being common.
I don't dispute any of that. More housing, modular construction, all great. It's just separate from the issue of this staircase requirement. I don't have any stake in staircases. If building technology makes the requirement obsolete, great. If the fire department is happy with one staircase, great. It just doesn't sound plausible that 6-15% premium for additional staircases is a root cause of the housing crisis, when developer profit opportunity is clearly the greater constraint.
If the fire department is happy with one staircase, great.
Fire departments make for very poor authorities on these matters, unfortunately. See the issue of them mandating completely oversized roads, since they can't imagine smaller fire engines that have precedent around the world.
It just doesn't sound plausible that 6-15% premium for additional staircases is a root cause of the housing crisis, when developer profit opportunity is clearly the greater constraint.
That's the thing though - there is no single root cause for the housing crisis. It's just a bunch of small issues stacked on top of each other, and each has to be addressed individually.
I'm still not sure if we're disagreeing even. Yeah, there are lots of issues at play, and I don't have strong feelings about stairs either way. I just think among all the issues, start with the most egregious, which is the commodification of housing. Beyond that, sure, tackle all the issues of inefficiency including outdated stair laws. The stair issue just feels like a scapegoat to avoid talking about societal issues.
Not covered on the site: The fact that San Francisco experiences earthquakes. Unlike all those other cities it sources as being perfectly fine with completely different building standards.
As the other comment mentions, Japan is listed as not having a maximum, making this more or less lose relevance.
On top of that, the stated motivation for the two stairwell rule is fire safety, which is only really adjacent to earthquake safety. Other locations have figured out that two stairwells are very much not necessary to achieve appropriate levels of fire safety, and San Francisco would do very well to learn from them.
True it didn’t, but Japan got earthquakes like they’re going out of style.
Having lived all my life in Austria, I didn't know until now that there were these kinds of regulations at all. Apparently according to the linked page, the maximum is 30 here; there are very few buildings in Austria that are this tall, typical apartment buildings in inner cities have 5 to 7 floors, they typically don't have more than one stairway and I've never thought of this as a potential safety problem.
Buildings with just one emergency exit stairway are capped at three stories in San Francisco. Anything taller requires two stairwells.
That text makes little sense, because if there is only one stairway, that's the friggin stairway, and not an "emergency" stairway.
I know most American buildings have elevators even if they only have 2 floors, but it's weird to call a stairway that is often faster to use, when it's just a few floors, an "emergency" stairway, just because it's the only option when the elevator doesn't work.
Especially if the elevator and stairway are in connected shafts, it's quite obviously not enough to only have 1 stairway, there needs to be a 2nd stairway with it's own separate shaft in case of fire, because you can't jump out the windows at 4 stories height.
its called an emergency stairway because it's usable in an emergency, not all stairway shaped things are.
Well here stairways also need to be usable in case of emergency, especially fire. Everything has fire codes that must be observed, we frigging don't call a stairway an emergency stairway just because it's legal. AFAIK even if you have 3, they ALL need to be according to safety protocols.
Also AFAIK we need to have at least 2 "emergency" stairways already above 2 floors.
thankfully 'murika let's there be aesthetic staircases that won't meet the same standards, like a big spiral staircase
stairway shaped things
