Did Oregon drop the ball on Single Stair Reform?

It's time to get nerdy about building codes

A child on the stairs in the Japanese Garden, 2025

Have You Heard the Good News?

If you’ve ever met a YIMBY, they can sometimes feel like Evangelical Christians or Crossfit enthusiasts. They’ll talk your ear about zoning reform and parking minimums and floor area ratios. It’s exhausting,¹ even when the facts are on their side.

If you’ve tuned them out, it means you may not have heard them pitch their newest gospel: Single Stair reform. I’ll try to keep it brief-ish, because I don’t want to be one of Those Guys.²

What is Single Stair reform?

Think back to your study abroad experience, my friendly bougie reader. Consider the cities you spent time in — Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris. Remember how walkable those cities were, how many mid-rise flats there were (you probably even stayed in one), how there were adorable cafes on corners to laze about in?

I suspect you thought, at some point, “why can’t we have this in America”?

There are many reasons why we can’t, too many to explain here. But Mike Eliason had the insight that across most of the world you can build 4 to 6 story apartment buildings around a single staircase, whereas in most of the US you can’t. That same apartment requires two stairwells.

Why does that matter? Design is all about constraints. The requirement for two stairwells constrains the architectural options for building layout.

Source: @TheTransitGuy on Threads. He got it from someone else.

In order to pencil out with two stairwells, nearly all builders make apartment buildings that look like the Holiday Inn Express you stayed in last night: a long “double loaded” corridor, with small rooms on each side.

The single stair approach allows for many more dynamic layouts, enabling a larger variety of units and facades. The benefits are legion:

• Better Apartments: Without that second stair, you can build more varied units in more buildings that fit on a wider variety of lots. Your apartment gets windows on multiple sides instead of just facing a hallway. Cross-ventilation! Natural light!

• Cheaper: Single-stair buildings can be 10-25% cheaper to build than double-loaded buildings.

• Family-Sized: Current rules basically force developers to build studios and 1-bedrooms because the building layout is so inefficient. As much as 75% of North American apartments are studios or have just one-bedroom. Single stair layouts make 2 and 3 bedroom apartments more financially feasible to build.

• More Housing: Without the long hallways of double-loaded buildings, single-stair buildings have a much smaller footprint and can be built on smaller lots.

The impact of this little code requirement is surprisingly deep.³

Why, then, do we require two?

There is a legitimate reason! We’re worried about fire. If there’s a first floor fire near the single staircase, you’re pretty screwed.

Except… what if the risk is low? Really low. From 2012 to 2024, NYC only had 3 fire deaths across 4,400+ single stair apartments. And the vast majority of those are older buildings, many without modern requirements around sprinklers, operable windows, pressurized stairwells, and so forth.

Put another way:

• Single stair 4 to 6 story buildings in NYC saw ~4.86 deaths per million “occupant years” of experience

• Over the same period, all other residential units in NYC saw ~4.54 deaths per million “occupant years” of experience.

• The difference is not statistically significant.

• All of the three deaths were in the unit where the fire originated. None of them would have been prevented by a second stairwell.

Three fire deaths in 12 years. Meanwhile, in just the first two months of 2021, three folks died in makeshift shelter fires in Portland.

The world is full of trade-offs and the more clear-eyed we are about that, the better.⁴ It’s not clear that single stair buildings are more dangerous than double loaded ones⁵ but even if they are, I’d rather a very slightly elevated fire risk if it means we can build more, to house more people, for cheaper and in ways that make for more dynamic and walkable cities.

So I’m pretty sold. And I’m not the only one. Single Stair reform has passed in Tennessee, Colorado, Austin (TX), and is in the “study/proposal” phase in a bunch of other jurisdictions.

Reform in Oregon

“But wait, Mort” I hear you saying, “didn’t Oregon pass something along these lines awhile back?”

You would be correct.

In June of 2023, HB3395 was signed into law. Key section:

SECTION 8. On or before October 1, 2025, the Department of Consumer and Business Services shall review and consider updates to the State of Oregon Structural Specialty Code through the Building Codes Structures Board established under ORS 455.132, to allow a residential occupancy to be served by a single exit

In October of 2023, Oregon’s Housing Production Advisory Council (HPAC) recommended singles stairs up to 5 floors in buildings with various other safety standards met (sprinklers, etc.)

Neat! So we have single stair options now?

Not so fast.

In the 2025 Oregon Structural Specialty Code review process, a public proposal (PP-02) for "Alternative safety measures for small-footprint apartment buildings of 4-6 stories and no more than 20 homes per stairwell" was unanimously disapproved by the committee.

Those codes are set and won’t be reviewed again until 2028. Which means there’s no single stair option for us for the foreseeable future.⁶

What the heck happened?

I’ve seen zero press on this so I had to go direct to the source:

Perusing through, it seems as though the committee was particularly concerned with how this would impact rural jurisdictions. They thought statewide adoption was inappropriate for rural areas with limited fire service capacity and, more generally, that there was a lack of sufficient safety data for the height increase.

I personally remain underwhelmed by these arguments but I can see why they voted the way they did. Ultimately rural jurisdictions may have different needs than urban ones. I don’t want to speak for those jurisdictions.

But I do live in Portland. Where does this leave our urban jurisdiction?

Turns out, we can amend our own building code through Oregon Revised Statute 455.040

This isn’t a turnkey process, I’m afraid. It requires:

• The city to submit a formal request

• Public meetings about the change

• State review and approval.

Arduous! But given the existing concerns of the committee, I’m skeptical we’ll see them change their tune in 2028. We might as well get started now.

Which means the next time you see your nearby city councilor, chat with them about the merits of Single Stair reform.

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Elsewhere, in local news

And now, for a roundup of other happenings locally. Lots of useful tidbits in the last few weeks. Here are the ones I found the most intriguing:

• The Broadway Bridge is closing to vehicle and streetcar traffic for six months, Oct. 2025 through Apr. 2026. One sidewalk will remain open for pedestrians and bikers. (Source).

  • Seems like necessary maintenance but expect traffic impacts, especially around Blazers games.

• Speaking of the Blazers, the $4.25B sale is final, with a couple of minority owners with ties to Oregon, which means the Blazers are staying in town. (Source).

  • It’s s good sign but with the Rose Garden lease up in 2030 there’s still a decent chance we have an arena fight ahead that gets ugly.

• It may be hard to get a covid vaccine this fall thanks to RFK Jr. related nonsense. (Source).

  • Internet rumor has it that the best place to get vaxxed and relaxed is Vancouver, WA right now, though that could change after this week’s ACIP meeting (scheduled for Thursday, Sep. 18).

• The Ash borer has made it to town. (Source).

  • Expect pretty gnarly impacts to the 100,000 ash trees in town (~2% of all of the trees in Portland). 😢

  • EDIT after publish: Some neat creative ideas / green shoots are out there to mitigate the impact. 😮

• This concert in the Rocky Butte Tunnel seems neat. (Source). 4 pm Saturday, Sept. 20. Free.

• I found this interview with John Tapogna illuminating about some of the longterm challenges Oregon has. (Link). He didn’t even mention PERS (though I guess that’s more a medium-term challenge at this point)!

  • Note the decline in Oregon K-12 performance aligns pretty neatly with the transition from the No Child Left Behind era to the Every Student Succeeds Act era.

• Pedestrian traffic downtown is up. Still down from the pandemic but at its highest in 5 years. (Source).

• A Michelin star Austin BBQ joint is opening up an outpost in Tough Luck (NE Dekum)! (Source). Mortlandia’s Texas correspondent⁷ gives us the skinny:

  This is super cool. La Barbecue is legit. […] One of the ladies who owned it, LeAnn (RIP), is from a family of BBQ folks, the Muellers, who go way back as pitmasters, and her brother, John (also RIP), made the best brisket and sauce I’ve ever had in my life. Cool to see them expanding up here.

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Thanks, as ever, for reading. Tell your friends.

1. Full disclosure: I find it charming. But I recognize how weird that is. How weird I am.

2. Yes. I recognize the irony in this statement. Shut up.

3. If you’re not convinced, I recommend reading more on the subject (Mercatus White paper, Second Egress examples). The option to build Single Stair won’t on it’s own evolve American cities into looking like Amsterdam or Paris, but the lack of that option certainly prevents it. Single stair reform is necessary but not sufficient, in the parlance of philosophers.

4. The old Joe Biden saw “don't compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative” lives in my head, rent free, forever.

5. Fire deaths in Spain, France, and the Netherlands are all lower than in the US, as of 2007’s data (Source).

6. Unless there’s an “administrative amendment” between now and 2028, the process for which is complicated and I do not at all understand.

7. John Griswold: native Texan, gentleman scholar, and famed Middlebury alumnus. Quoted without his permission from one of my many group chats with him.