About Here
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2023–2025
12:10 · 2.2M views · Dec 11, 2023
About Here explains how North American building codes requiring two staircases make small multi-story apartment buildings hard to build, and contrasts this with places that allow single-stair designs.
HN commenters share it in housing and single-stair egress threads as an enjoyable, accessible explainer of the two-stair rule.
8 comments from Hacker News
I liked this youtube video that covers the same topic[1]. The US focusing entirely on this strategy to increase fire safety seems obviously stupid to me. As people say in other comments here - Europe and other countries require better fire suppression measures and materials instead of particular egress options. An obvious improvement would be to allow builders to use any combination of these approaches to achieve a minimal level of safety. [1] this video
A video I found interesting related to this: this video Outdated building codes require 2 stairs, making smaller multi-story housing infeasible. So only larger (whole block) projects pencil out, but people don’t like them because they don’t fit in well. I wonder if smaller (the size of 1-2 normal lots) 4-6 floor buildings spread out more would face less resistance.
I caught a YouTube about this recently that I really enjoyed. "Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments (Because of One Rule)" this video
See also a related video by About Here: this video which mentions this very pertinent section of the US National Housing Association Proceedings (1913), p.212: "Do everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two-family dwellings, because the two-family house is the next least objectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind... if we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even where there are only three families; if we require fire escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds (compared to zoning regulations based on race), because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power[...] In our laws let most of the fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever"
The lack of large apartments in the US is at least partially caused by building codes requiring two means of fire egress (meaning two separate stairwells in taller buildings) which limits the size and layout of individual apartments. Here’s a video on the subject: this video Long story short though, modern fire mitigation techniques (materials, sprinklers, fire doors) greatly reduce the risk posed by having just one staircase, which would open up a wide array of apartment layouts.