A Culver City solution to housing crisis: Fewer stairs

In late September, Culver City became the first municipality in California to legalize the construction of mid-rise apartment buildings with a single staircase.

- BY BEN CHRISTOPHER

Adobe CULVER CITY apartments up to six stories can be built around a single stairwell under a new ordinance.

Unless you're a member of the niche, but fervent subculture of architects, urbanists and pro-housing advocates who clamor for "single stair reform," this might not sound like big news. But supporters say it could be the key to unleashing the kind of urban apartment building boom that years of pro-development legislation in Sacramento have tried, and so far failed, to deliver.

Culver City apartments up to six stories tall can now be built around a single stairwell. Conditions apply: These buildings have to be on the small side - each floor maxes out at 4,000 square feet with no more than four units. They'll also have to abide by an array of added fire-prevention measures.

That's a break from the standard minimum of two staircases connected by a corridor required of buildings taller than three stories in nearly every other city in the country.

For champions of more housing development, ditching the extra staircase has become a surprisingly buzzy and enduring cause.

They say it can turbocharge urban housing construction at a modest and more affordable scale while also promoting apartments that are bigger, airier and better lighted.

For more than a decade in California, pro-development activists have railed against zoning, the local patchwork of restrictions on what can get built where.

Those efforts are beginning to bear fruit: Earlier this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of housing bills aimed at clearing legal impediments to apartment construction.

The campaign for changes to the building code , the rules that specify in mind-numbing detail exactly how buildings must be constructed, appears to be the next chapter of this fight.

Single stair, and the fate of Culver City's ordinance specifically, represents an early California acid test.