Single-Stair Reform in Culver City
Our Culver is committed to community-led solutions for our housing crisis, especially those that increase affordability and sustainability. We're excited to share an initiative that has been gaining support across the nation, most recently in the City of Los Angeles. We appreciate the Livable Communities Initiative (LCI) providing us this summary of their work on single-stair reform in Culver City, and we hope our readers and supporters find it useful.
Livable Communities Initiative’s vision
The vision of single-staircase construction is to encourage small commercial parcel-holders to improve their properties by adding housing. It’s about adding apartment units above retail shops to create “gentle density” along Culver City’s transportation corridors, in the process creating a Town Center feel:
Help our downtowns thrive with the added foot traffic
Provide affordable and high-quality housing options for people who want to live and work in Culver City.
Reduce commuting traffic by providing housing options within walking and biking distance from Sony Pictures, Apple, Amazon and others.
Make it easy for the commercial property owners - the entitlement process should be as easy as adding an ADU.
What stands in the way?
Building apartments on small lots is the norm in most of the world, and increasingly in the US. These specific types of buildings are called “Single Stair” - meaning for small buildings, a single stairway is sufficient to serve four apartments on a floor.
Many cities, including Culver City, still have an outdated policy of requiring two stairways (with a long hallway) for multifamily housing above 2-3 stories.
This means the smaller format type of housing can’t be built until the code is updated. Culver City is taking its final step to update the code and enable this type of building at its meeting on Monday, September 29. On September 8, the City Council unanimously directed staff to prepare an ordinance to allow a single stairway in small buildings up to 6 stories.
Information on the PH-1 council topic: Single-Stair Reform
Today, most small commercial property owners in Culver City cannot build residential over retail on their lots. Hotel-style long hallways and two stairs don’t fit. You need a single stairway in the middle.
With the single-stair code update, these homes can be built, adding much-needed, high-quality family-sized apartments, efficiently sited on Culver City’s abundance of small commercial lots. These units don’t feel like hotel rooms — they feel like homes, with cross-ventilation and lots of light — filling a much needed equity gap between SFHs and larger apartment complexes.
Single-stair is only for small buildings: four apartments (maximum) per floor sharing a single stair, on building footprints that are the size of a large single family home. Nobody is advocating for single stairways in large apartment buildings.
Seattle, Honolulu, New York, the state of Texas (and soon Connecticut, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington), along with most of the rest of the world already allow small single stair buildings.
City Council directed staff to write an ordinance based on Seattle’s code, widely respected as the best model for safe, small buildings of this type, with a long history of safety since it was adopted in 1977. This the most conservative, least controversial way forward by replicating the Seattle code exactly.
However, city staff wrote the proposed ordinance based on a Los Angeles proposal, which they thought was aligned with Seattle code. The LA proposal was rejected because it is unbuildable. Therefore, the proposed Culver City ordinance must be amended to align with Seattle code or it is unusable.
Seattle’s (and NYC’s) single stair buildings have been studied due to their long history. Pew Charitable Trusts released an exhaustive, 100 page research report and concluded that of the (4) fire-related deaths in NYC and Seattle’s modern single-stairway buildings from 2012 to 2024, lack of a second stairway did not play a role in any of those fatalities, and that the rate of fire deaths in NYC’s 4,440 modern single-stair buildings the same as other residential buildings.
Why now? Urgency is needed for this single-stair ordinance: Culver City (along with other California jurisdictions) are acting with appropriate urgency due to the unintended consequences of recently passed AB130, which enforces a freeze of building code changes after Sept 30, 2025, for six years. Culver City, in particular, would lose at least 6 years of housing production which could otherwise unlock a large quantity of housing on its many small commercial parcels, and miss the opportunity to invigorate downtown businesses with gentle downtown density.
More safety details: small, single-stair buildings are safer in several respects than many large apartment buildings.
In single-stair buildings, the four apartments on a floor directly access the enclosed stair landing. There is effectively no hallway. Code requires a maximum of 20' distance, apartment door to stair. This is a very short egress path similar to a single family home - versus long corridors in a large apartment building that can be challenging to navigate in emergencies, especially for elderly and mobility-impaired.
Single stairway buildings are state of the art from a fire safety perspective. The stairs are sprinklered , 2 hours rated, and include extra features such as positive pressure to ensure smoke cannot fill the stairwells even if a door is propped open.
The Seattle code caps the buildings at 6 stories maximum, to allow for sufficient density for affordability as needed, without compromising safety.
In a small, single-stair building, the stairwell will likely be less crowded in an emergency, versus the two stairwells in a larger building serving a much larger number of residents.
Eight adjacent “single-stair” buildings: 8 stairs.
One large multifamily building complex: 2 stairs.
Side by side, single-stair buildings have more stairways per unit than many large buildings. They also remove the long corridors that run the length of these buildings. These corridors are often the most dangerous feature of the building because smoke can fill the entire hallway, and the fire itself can travel the length of the entire building. Single-stair buildings have external firewalls between each building, so both smoke and fire are far less likely to spread long distances.
Further conclusions from the Pew Charitable Trusts report:
In the Netherlands, where single-stairway construction is common, residential fire-related death rates are one-third those of the U.S.
Allowing single-stairway four-to-six-unit buildings could stimulate the construction of badly needed new housing, especially in already-developed neighborhoods near public transportation and commercial areas.
