A New Way to Fix the Housing Crisis
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Two decades ago, the fire marshal in Glendale, Arizona, was concerned that the elevators in a new stadium wouldn't be large enough to accommodate a 7-foot stretcher held flat. Tilting a stretcher to make it fit in the cab, the marshal worried, might jeopardize the treatment of a patient with a back injury. Maybe our elevators should be bigger, he thought.
The marshal put this idea to the International Code Council, the organization that governs the construction of American buildings. After minor feedback and minimal research (the marshal measured three stretchers in the Phoenix area), the suggestion was incorporated into the ICC's model code. Based on one man's hunch, most of the country's new elevators grew by several square feet overnight. The medical benefits were not quantified, and the cost impact was reported as 'none.'
It is one of the many small rules that have divorced our national building standards from the rest of the world. According to research by the building policy wonk Stephen Smith, who recounted this story in a report last year, changes like these are one reason it now costs three times as much to install an elevator in the U.S. than in Switzerland or South Korea.
What does America need to get its building mojo back? Some look to the past, and observe that we once built towering monuments and vital infrastructure at lightning speed. Others look to the future, banking on revolutions in artificial intelligence and robotics, new materials and technologies, or modular construction techniques.
Smith prefers to look around the present. The Center for Building in North America, which he founded in 2022, is translating global wisdom on the design of elevators, stairways, and other hidden innards of our buildings for a U.S. audience.
The key word there is translating. Unlike in medicine or computer science, in which English is the language of expertise, information about building practices is hopelessly divided between countries. In construction, we are still standing around the unfinished Tower of Babel, unable to communicate knowledge about plumbing, HVAC, or window design.
Smith has watched as other issues he has championed—restrictive zoning, parking minimums—took off. Now the former journalist, co-founder of New York City's pro-housing group Open NY, and onetime Twitter power user known as @MarketUrbanism is sizing up a larger and more complicated target for reform: building codes, the long, technical documents that govern how our apartments get put together.
'A zoning code is not fun to read, but a motivated amateur can figure it out,' he observed. 'But building codes and standards—unless it's your job, you will never get it.' So, two years ago, he made it his job. Smith, advised by a three-person board and funded by a grant from Open Philanthropy, now works under the Center for Building in North America. It is an effort to improve the way the country builds by dissecting what Smith estimates is over 100,000 pages of technical specifications, and determining which parts might be doing more harm than good.
Pressure is mounting on U.S. building codes from all sides. Advocates for flagging downtowns would like to change the rules to make it easier to convert office buildings into apartments. California is grappling with how stringent codes might be impeding the recovery from the Los Angeles wildfires (and how lax rules might have caused the disaster in the first place). Conservatives are furious over energy-efficiency updates, and some red states have sued the federal government over their enforcement. Modular construction companies are grappling with the country's fragmented code landscape, in which rules can vary between states and cities.
Everywhere, the crisis of housing affordability has built momentum to relax long-standing quality-of-life rules to permit cheaper apartments (think: windowless bedrooms, microunits). Rather than rising to the occasion, the solutions just keep getting weirder and worse. Into this contentious discussion steps Smith, with a different idea: What if we could change our ways and build things better, without any sacrifice at all?
Late one winter afternoon, I went for a walk with Smith in his East Williamsburg neighborhood. It's a hip part of Brooklyn, where the centuries-old clapboard houses are interspersed with glassy boxes of recent vintage. A good place, in other words, to scrutinize the types of structures that have characterized the recent big-city building boom.
Smith noticed a woman with a dog leaving the lobby of her apartment building. He said: 'Excuse me, does this building have an elevator?' She replied: 'Yes—are you looking at moving in?' 'Uh, yeah,' he stammered.
He wasn't, but saying yes was simpler than explaining the truth: Smith had recently published a 122-page report about the country's failure to build good elevators. That research, a summary of which appeared in the New York Times in July, concluded that Americans, despite having invented the elevator and the skyscraper, have forfeited our mastery of this most fundamental urban transportation device.
A combination of codes, standards, and labor practices has left the United States suffering from a national shortage of elevators compared with our peers, Smith found. As a result, much of our new, mid-rise infill housing of three, four, and even five stories is off limits to those who cannot use the stairs. The research was inspired by Smith's own long illness, which left him struggling to climb the stairs to his apartment. 'While many of us may be stair users for the moment,' he wrote, 'we're all born disabled and, with any luck, we will die disabled as well.'
That report builds off another Smith hobbyhorse: What we lack in elevators, we more than make up for in staircases. Four years ago, the Seattle architect Michael Eliason began drawing attention to the fact that American building codes are unusual in their requirement that even short, small apartment buildings contain two staircases. This fire-safety mandate produces apartment complexes with long central hallways (think: the Overlook Hotel) and apartments with windows on only one side. In his book Building for People, Eliason shows how this rule makes apartment construction on small lots impossible or impossibly expensive, prohibiting many designs that flourish in places like Germany.
Last year, inspired by these observations, Smith and the California housing researcher Ed Mendoza published a thorough policy brief on single-stair buildings in Cityscape, the journal of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Through the Center for Building, Smith has helped jurisdictions that want to make changes and tracks those that have.
'It gives more gravitas than some architect loudmouth in Seattle,' said Eliason, who sits on the center's board. 'Stephen has created a centralized area for the effort, distributing knowledge, building relationships.'
Jesse Salomon, a state senator in Washington state, was one of the first lawmakers to take up the cause. In 2023 the governor signed Salomon's bill directing the state's building codes commission to study single-stair reform. 'I hate when politicians say crisis, but we do have a housing-supply crisis, and allowing systems to work as they have in the past is not an option,' he told me. 'I think maybe they track towards overregulating in the name of safety. The lack of housing is also a safety problem.'
The principal objection to higher structures with one stairway is fire safety. But according to new research by Smith and Alex Horowitz of Pew Charitable Trusts, there was no correlation between fire deaths and modern single-stair architecture over a 12-year period in New York City, the rare jurisdiction that permits six-story buildings with one stairway.
'There has been so much interest from policymakers,' said Horowitz, the director of Pew's Housing Policy Initiative. 'The one question holding back authorizing single-stair construction to help make a dent in the housing shortage has been questions about fire safety. That's why we wanted to do empirical work here, and we found that there's no trade-off with safety.'
At least 11 states and three cities have passed single-stair legislation since the beginning of 2023, according to the Pew report, with many of them turning to the Center for Building for expertise and occasional testimony. The latest to take on the subject is Massachusetts, where, following an October report on single-stair reform, Gov. Maura Healey's Unlocking Housing Production Commission recommended the policy change for buildings up to six stories with as many as 24 units.
Austin, Texas, is one city where the council has directed staff to study changes to the staircase code. 'The building code is the next frontier after the zoning code,' said Parker Welch, an advocate with the local pro-housing group AURA who used the center's work to advocate for the reform. 'All these systems work in conjunction with each other. It's this Gordian knot you're trying to untie.'
In a sense, these activists are following a familiar urbanist playbook of the past two decades: Find the hidden rules, then rewrite them. After the parking scholar Donald Shoup put pressure on the Institute of Transportation Engineers for their prescriptive, suburban parking rules, the association's president stopped supporting mandatory parking minimums in 2019. YIMBY groups have dug into obscure zoning provisions. The National Association of City Transportation Officials, founded in 1996, has advocated for pedestrian-friendly changes in the codebook that governs American roadway design and recently got its own street design guides approved for use in federally funded projects. New York University's Transit Costs Project has dissected the differences between rail transit construction in the United States and abroad, spotlighting assumptions we should revisit.
In Olympia, meanwhile, Salomon has moved a new bill through the state Senate inspired by Smith's research: update the state building code to permit elevators in small apartment buildings to comply with 'global safety standards'—giving flexibility to architects and opening the state's elevator market to popular, smaller international models.
The first U.S. building codes emerged from a public-minded desire for health and safety and growing pressure from the insurance industry, which manifested in Progressive Era tenement laws and fire-prevention rules. It was a bottom-up process, messily divided between three distinct code-making organizations until the 1990s, when the International Code Council was created. In 2000 the organization established the International Building Code, which applies to buildings larger than single-family homes.
Like the World Series, the IBC is largely an American institution, with updates to construction standards discussed among members at regular meetings, culminating in a new set of codes every three years. Those 'model' codes are then adopted by cities and states.
Mike Eriksen, a professor of economics at Purdue, is one of the few academics studying how the requirements affect construction and design. It's to be expected, he cautioned, that industry groups would complain about the rules that dictate their practices. In 2022, for example, the National Multifamily Housing Council reported that adapting to code changes was the single greatest driver of increased development costs, accounting for more than 10 percent of the total cost of a building. But up-front costs are only part of the affordability puzzle: the Biden administration urged jurisdictions to modernize codes on the grounds that smarter choices during construction would save people money in energy bills and after disasters.
At the same time, Eriksen says, the IBC process typically displays a 'general lack of evidence-based research on the costs and benefits of proposed revisions.' Eriksen notes that there are unacknowledged trade-offs in many of these new code provisions. A change in the 2021 International Fire Code, for example, required that midsize construction sites employ a 'fire watch' during nonworking hours. Nobody wants to see a construction site catch fire, but how often does that happen? Enough to justify a fire watch? How many fires does the fire watch prevent? A night watchman alone would not make or break a new development, but this is one of many such provisions, often motivated by fire safety, that stack up in the code every three years.
In the Pew study, Smith and Horowitz point out that some fire-safety rules might even be counterproductive, to the extent they delay new construction. 'Requirements that discourage new building may have a paradoxical effect on fire safety, as people instead continue to live in older buildings that are more vulnerable to fire risk, because they were usually built without modern fire-rated materials, compartmentation, and active fire protection features,' the report concludes.
The ICC, for its part, argues that its system is designed for advocates to make their voices heard on these issues. 'The open and transparent governmental consensus process convened by the Code Council allows for any interested party to help shape the next edition of the I-Codes,' Russ Manning, the ICC's senior vice president of technical services, said in a statement. 'Stakeholders from across the built environment participate by attending code hearings, serving on special committees, and submitting public comments and code change proposals.'
Still, some code reformers I spoke to believe that U.S. building regulations ought to be (under a different administration, surely) the responsibility of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the only entity with the authority and expertise to match other countries' federal guidance on construction and impartially weigh trade-offs between safety and affordability. There is precedent for this: Since 1976, the 'HUD code' has been the guiding document for manufactured housing, or mobile homes.
'I want us to have a building code that's motivated by science and informed by trade-offs,' Eriksen said. 'I'm worried we're building a world that's too expensive to live in.'
Not long after we concluded our tour of Brooklyn's newest residential architecture, Smith sent me an impossibly esoteric item from Washington: State legislators had drafted an ordinance to prohibit local governments from requiring or prohibiting exterior cladding, such as boards or shingles, beyond what is specified in existing building codes. This seemed to be an explicit response to an idea buried deep in a draft of a Seattle zoning revision that would have required cladding to be half an inch thick, thereby quietly banning the cheap, popular siding known as Hardie boards, which are 5/16 of an inch thick. The state's preemption would preserve the use of a popular facade material and maintain flexibility for builders in Seattle.
'As you get into the more arcane issues, I don't know if this can scale,' Smith said of his work with the Center for Building. 'It becomes a game of whack-a-mole.'
That's because the ICC merely drafts model codes. States and cities adopt and modify the documents, creating a patchwork of rules with subtle variations from place to place, all the way down to the thickness of the boards. California and Alabama have adopted the 2021 International Building Code; Texas and Indiana are still using the 2012 version. Chicago has different rules from its suburbs, which have different rules from northwest Indiana. It's a challenging environment for developers of modular housing, in which factory-built components are assembled on-site.
On the one hand, this creates an opportunity for reform: The pressure of so many cities and states drafting their own single-stair requirements, subverting the International Building Code's expertise, has helped Smith make the case for a change in the new IBC that would allow most four-story buildings to have just one staircase anywhere in America that uses the model code. If all goes well, your state may soon permit this more flexible style of missing-middle housing as a default.
In a sense, that's the beauty of the ICC process: Just as a fire marshal in Glendale can single-handedly change the size of American elevators, a researcher in Brooklyn might be about to change the rules of small-building design.
On the other hand, one reason for that building-code patchwork is a growing backlash, which threatens reformers' inside-game approach. Some of this is rooted in GOP opposition to conservation measures, but blue states are not immune from getting fed up with new requirements. In California, for example, a new bill in the statehouse would pause nonessential changes to the building code for the next six years. Its author, state Sen. Nick Schultz, said this would allow homeowners recovering from the L.A. fires to 'accurately estimate the cost of the work, and ease some pricing pressure on the homebuilding industry.'
If that happens, it would also delay the arrival of small, single-stair missing-middle housing in California for a decade. 'What we're proposing are cost-saving measures,' said Mendoza, who co-wrote the HUD policy brief on single-stair housing. 'And those could get thrown out.' Right before an opportunity to rebuild two enormous neighborhoods in Los Angeles from scratch.
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