Condos and apartment buildings are seen in downtown Vancouver on Feb. 2, 2017.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
B.C. will look at changing its building code to allow small apartments to be built with a single stair, adding to its reputation as the province most willing to try new ideas to create more housing supply, though the move is also drawing safety-related concerns.
Canada’s building code, which provinces have generally gone along with, has required two staircases per apartment building since 1941. But B.C.’s Ministry of Housing last week published a research report outlining the optimal conditions for single staircases.
“We are definitely moving forward with this,” said Ravi Kahlon, the Housing Minister, who hopes to introduce the legislation allowing the change in the fall.
Mr. Kahlon said that the option of “single-egress” buildings, as they’re also called, will be confined to areas where there is professional fire services (as opposed to rural-style volunteer departments) and good water supply, as is the case in Seattle. That city has allowed single-stair buildings since 1974.
“We can do this safely but have more larger units,” he said.
The change would limit the single-stair options to buildings of no more than six storeys, with no more than four apartments per floor. There would also need to be other fire-safety measures introduced, such as wider staircases.
The province’s report, which was commissioned to engineering and consulting services company Jensen Hughes, also suggested other enhancements, such as the kind of smoke-management mechanisms typically only used in high-rises and non-combustible materials for the stairs. Housing staff will be deciding on which of those to require for the building-code change.
Housing advocates have been pressing for the staircase change for several years. They say it would make it more financially viable to build small apartment buildings – a more attractive infill option for many people than the ubiquitous 20-storey concrete towers that have been the dominant type of project in Vancouver recently – and allow for better layouts that could improve the light and air that each unit gets.
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Because of the standard of two staircases, most of the country’s current stock ends up with units strung out along a long enclosed hallway with a staircase at each end. That means that each apartment gets a window on only one end, except for those in the corners; the change to a single-stair layout will allow for windows on at least two sides of each unit.
According to extensive research done by Conrad Speckert, a project manager with LGA Architectural Partners in Toronto, Canada is one of the most restrictive countries in the world on the issue of two staircases, requiring them in any building over two storeys. Only Uganda is worse, with a requirement in every building over a single storey.
However, professional firefighter associations and disability-advocacy groups have expressed concerns in B.C. and other places considering a change to single-stair egress.
Early on in the province’s consultations, Jason Cairney, a representative for the Fire Chiefs’ Association of B.C., said their group wanted to be reassured that firefighting strategies wouldn’t be affected.
“If the one stairwell becomes compromised, that blocks the only way out,” he said.
Brad McCannell, a representative with the Rick Hansen Foundation, a registered charity that tackles disability barriers, said one merit the community sees with the changes is that it will likely mean that the requirement to have areas of refuge built in will come back.
But he said he didn’t understand how it could possibly be as safe to only have one staircase: “I can’t see the logic.”
The province has no estimate of how many new smaller apartments the change might facilitate. In theory, it should make it easier to develop a single residential lot into an apartment building. A B.C. housing report on the subject calculated that a small building constructed according to the new standard could generate 22 apartments.
The amount of new building it might generate will likely depend on the quirks of various municipalities’ policies. Vancouver, for example, only allows small apartment buildings on properties that have a 66-foot frontage, which means assembling two lots instead of being able to build on one.
History in Vancouver has shown that developers who need to assemble lots end up paying much more for properties because owners will often band together and refuse to sell as a package unless they get offers that are significantly higher than normal selling prices.
Developers trying to assemble the five lots needed for tower projects in the city’s controversial Broadway Plan area are paying double assessed value, a factor that ends up driving a need for greater density on the site to cover those costs.