This obscure rule is one reason San Francisco can’t build more housing
This obscure rule is one reason San Francisco can’t build more housing
www.sfchronicle.com
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29 comments
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Is this click bait?
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Title definitely reads like click bait.
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Why
San Fransiscodevelopers can't build more housing. They take for granted that new housing needs to be profitable for developers. Public housing should also be in the conversation.-
Public housing follows the same rules. This makes any multi-story building more expensive for everyone, and the rules need to be reformed regardless of who builds the building and regardless of their motivations.
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Not covered on the site: The fact that San Francisco experiences earthquakes. Unlike all those other cities it sources as being perfectly fine with completely different building standards.
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True it didn’t, but Japan got earthquakes like they’re going out of style.
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Yeah but that's just because of all the sumo wrestling matches going on.
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As the other comment mentions, Japan is listed as not having a maximum, making this more or less lose relevance.
On top of that, the stated motivation for the two stairwell rule is fire safety, which is only really adjacent to earthquake safety. Other locations have figured out that two stairwells are very much not necessary to achieve appropriate levels of fire safety, and San Francisco would do very well to learn from them.
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The multiple references to 'fire safety organizations' read to me like 'fire departments'. Fire departments across North America already dictate what our roads (and therefore cities) look like. Seems like a logical leap they would also impose control over the corridors within buildings too.
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I’ve read this claim before - the requirement for two ways out is building/Fire code.
The claim that it makes a huge difference in the number of apartments doesn’t seem credible, nor has any included sufficient evidence that only one way out is sufficient.
Usually one of the counter-arguments is building material. Maybe if you’re building with stone and concrete, that’s less flammable than wood. However even then every wall has paint and every room has furniture
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Buildings with just one emergency exit stairway are capped at three stories in San Francisco. Anything taller requires two stairwells.
That text makes little sense, because if there is only one stairway, that's the friggin stairway, and not an "emergency" stairway.
I know most American buildings have elevators even if they only have 2 floors, but it's weird to call a stairway that is often faster to use, when it's just a few floors, an "emergency" stairway, just because it's the only option when the elevator doesn't work.Especially if the elevator and stairway are in connected shafts, it's quite obviously not enough to only have 1 stairway, there needs to be a 2nd stairway with it's own separate shaft in case of fire, because you can't jump out the windows at 4 stories height.
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its called an emergency stairway because it's usable in an emergency, not all stairway shaped things are.
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I worked in a building that sealed one staircase shut if a fire alarm was pulled because it accessed sensitive areas. It was meant to get to them and if you were in it you could escape but it was useless for the rest of the building so you’re right. Just because it’s a stairwell doesn’t mean it counts in an emergency
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stairway shaped things
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Well here stairways also need to be usable in case of emergency, especially fire. Everything has fire codes that must be observed, we frigging don't call a stairway an emergency stairway just because it's legal. AFAIK even if you have 3, they ALL need to be according to safety protocols.
Also AFAIK we need to have at least 2 "emergency" stairways already above 2 floors.
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Having lived all my life in Austria, I didn't know until now that there were these kinds of regulations at all. Apparently according to the linked page, the maximum is 30 here; there are very few buildings in Austria that are this tall, typical apartment buildings in inner cities have 5 to 7 floors, they typically don't have more than one stairway and I've never thought of this as a potential safety problem.
29 comments
I am 100% not convinced. It seems incredibly obvious that if you have a building that you can't jump the windows of, do want at least two avenues of escape in the event of a fire?. What moron is arguing otherwise? If you want to argue that then show me statistics.
Also fuck whoever created that website, a constant upward scrolling was awful.
I'm living in a 15 floor apartment building with a single stairwell. (Germany, the building is from 2015)
There's two elevators, one of them is equipped for firefighters (manual control possible after inserting the firefighters' key, windows)
The single escape stairwell is isolated from the rest of the house by double doors (kind of an airlock against smoke). The escape stairwell is isolated against smoke and fire.
Also on every floor there's a kind of glass cage in front of the elevators with a normally open door, in case of fire this will isolate the elevators against smoke.
In case of a fire alarm all the doors will automatically close (you can still open them. manually), additionally huge fans will be pulling clean air through the stairwell and the elevators.
We have individual fire alarms in every room - and a common system, connected to the fire department, in the shared areas.
So it's a "put all of your eggs into one basket, but have a damn good basket" concept.
Btw, I'm on 8th floor, so too high to jump and probably already out of reach of the FD's "extensible ladder" car.
Now only missing are the yearly fire drill like it was in school.