In a letter to the editor, Darío Gutiérrez, James Lee, and Eric Allen Conner explain how single-stair reform can improve housing affordability and the walkability in municipalities.
Dear Editor,
All across New Jersey, housing prices have been skyrocketing, as there is a critical shortage of new homes to keep up with job and population growth. We need more housing to keep residents in our state and keep housing costs affordable to regular New Jerseyans.
While many factors are to blame, single-stair reform is a proven remedy that lowers the cost of constructing new housing and advances more affordable and diverse housing options.
Even better, it can improve our streetscapes and make our towns more walkable in the process.
It works by providing flexibility to design new apartment buildings without redundant staircases, while encouraging and prioritizing other more effective fire safety methods.
What is single-stair reform? Currently, a little-known administrative code requirement in New Jersey requires two stairwells connected by a hallway on each floor in all multi-family buildings above 3 stories, even small buildings with a single apartment per floor.
This may seem like a well-intentioned rule, but in reality, this requirement is unusual in other developed countries, is far from innocuous, and has no evidence to back it up.
It turns out that this requirement wastes space, increases costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars per staircase, and isn’t even helpful for safety in smaller mid-rise buildings that have sprinklers and other modern fire safety measures.
In nearly all European cities and even across the Hudson River in NYC, modern single-staircase buildings have been built for decades.
Fire departments have been rescuing residents in these single-staircase buildings just as safely as in NJ, supported by high fire safety design standards that are geared specifically toward mitigating fire risk in these types of buildings.
In fact, a recent analysis of 12 years of fire data by the Pew Charitable Foundation finds that single-stair buildings in NYC and Seattle had death rates as low or lower than two-stair buildings, with not a single death attributed to having a single stair in the 12-year study period, across tens of thousands of modern single-stair buildings.
What’s more, if you’ve ever wondered why new buildings tend to be bulky and monolithic and often lack a ground floor retail space, it turns out that the requirement for a redundant staircase and connecting hallway are big drivers of this too.
The unnecessary mandate makes it uneconomic to build modest-scale housing on smaller lots and forces projects to build on large consolidated lots.
The resulting lack of space for a storefront creates gaps in commercial corridors, discourages walkability, and literally drives business away. Additionally, the lifeless streets lead to a smaller property tax base leaving the burden of higher taxes to residents.
There is hope for NJ to see similar benefits in the near future. A-4972, introduced by Assemblymember Calabrese (Bergen & Passaic), and co-sponsored by District 31 Assemblywoman McCann-Stamato (Jersey City & Bayonne) and other lawmakers, will help make these benefits a reality in New Jersey by empowering municipalities with the choice to allow four-to-six-story single-stairway multi-family residential buildings.
These standards set out by municipalities may also include upgrades to existing safety regulations such as higher firewall ratings, pressurized or open-air stairwells, better sprinkler systems and shorter distances to the building exit.
Almost all European countries have long allowed single-stair buildings, a key factor in creating cities with some of the most iconic and charming streetscapes in the world.
In the US, cities like New York and Seattle already allow single-stair multi-family buildings up to 6 stories.
And in recent years, an increasing number of states across the country have successfully enacted single-stair reform and lowered the cost of their housing.
With rising costs everywhere, it is urgent we take this important step toward joining them.
Use our template to email your legislators and tell them to support A-4972!
So you three guys just happed to come together to promote single stairways for new residential buildings greater than 3 stories AT NO BENEFIT TO YOURSELVES. Yeah, right. What are you, developers? Or are you unscrupulous lawyers, architects, engineers who sell your integrity by being the eager mouthpieces for greedy developers who try to flout municipal and NJ land use and RSIS statutes at our local and County Planning and Zoning Board hearings? Read up on the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. Would you also remove this level of fire protection for your own families, as well?
If one egress stair in a multi -story building fills with smoke, are tenants supposed to fling themselves out their windows? Are firefighters with their hoses and heavy equipment supposed to share one stair with families fleeing the building? Your “idea” is a non-starter.
Single-stairway buildings can actually be safer. For something like fire risk, better to use hard data than randomly speculate. From the linked Pew Charitable Foundation Study:
– In New York City, the overall rate of fire deaths in its 4,440 modern single-stair buildings since 2012 was the same as in other residential buildings.
– We were able to find a total of four fire-related deaths in New York City and Seattle’s modern single-stairway buildings from 2012 to 2024. The lack of a second stairway did not play a role in any of those fatalities.
– In the Netherlands, where single-stairway construction is common in four- and five-story buildings, the fire death rate in those buildings is on par with the fire-related death rate in other types of residential buildings. Overall, residential fire-related death rates in the Netherlands are one-third those of the U.S.
– If sprinklers do not function, there are significant risks associated with smoke spreading in the long, horizontal corridors of dual-stairway buildings that have become standard in the U.S. and Canada. Single-stairway designs, which do not have long corridors, mitigate this problem.
I am one of the authors. I can attest that neither Dario nor Jimmy nor I work for developers or any law firms engaged in real estate. Dario and I recently started an economics-focused political advocacy group that uses research data and empirical economic research to advocate for better policies on housing, transit, and street safety. One of Better Blocks New Jersey’s goals is to combat misinformation spread by people like the first two commenters in this comments section.
I lived for many years before I got married in a single-stair mid-rise apartment building (pre-war) in downtown Jersey City and currently live in a four-story, single-stair building. Modern single-stair buildings are even safer than their pre-war counterparts, cheaper to build, and offer more space for families and businesses, making for better communities.