Single stair buildings are beautiful, sustainable, and safe.
Help them come to Chicago!
Single-stair buildings are one the world’s most beloved forms of urban housing. They can be great for families, help maintain neighborhood character, and have a strong safety record.
Single-Stair, Many Benefits
Charming, family-sized, and great for neighborhood character. There are so many reasons to love six-story single-stair apartment buildings. That’s why these little buildings could be the next BIG thing in your town.
You may have noticed that many apartment buildings today tend to look like this one. They can take up whole blocks and often look out of place in neighborhoods.
What’s happening? Well, most cities’ regulations require apartment buildings above three stories to have two stairways serving every floor. This in turn necessitates a hallway bisecting each floor, which consumes a lot of space and pushes developers to build at a huge scale to make the project work.
These buildings are known as “double-loaded hallway apartment buildings”, referring to the two-stairway requirement. This requirement sounds reasonable but it actually does little for safety and has many downsides, as we’ll see later.
