The Center for Building in North America coauthored a report with the Pew Charitable Trusts on single-stair apartment buildings, with a focus on cost savings and the safety track record in New York City and Seattle. On the cost side, we found that a second stairway for a mid-rise apartment buildings costs roughly $200,000 to construct. On the life safety side, we combined NFIRS data and reports of home fire fatalities from the U.S. Fire Administration, which we joined with property-level data in New York City, through which we found no evidence of any fire fatality attributable to the lack of a second exit in any of the more than 4,000 single-stair apartment buildings of at least four stories in the city. Similarly, we manually reviewed records of fatal fires in Seattle and found the same.
Autore: Center-for-Building
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Elevators
We approach the issue of high elevator costs and low availability in North America from a comparative perspective, drawing on experiences in Europe in particular to examine the issue through the lenses of affordability, access, accessibility, codes and standards, and labor. We present the first public comparison between costs in the United States and our high-income peers in Europe (both for installations and ongoing items like maintenance), as well as the most up-to-date comparison of global elevator stocks. We look at the cost drivers, in three main categories – cabin sizes, labor productivity, and technical codes and standards unrelated to cabin size. We look at a few different cases of how other countries approach various issues related to elevators, from how China retrofits elevators into occupied walk-up apartment buildings (common in Europe too, but almost unheard of project in the U.S. and Canada) to France’s recent tightening of building accessibility requirements to Poland’s efforts to improve technical and vocational education to meet the labor needs of the elevator industry in the wake of its accession to the European Union.
Finally, we present practical advice to policymakers in the U.S. and Canada who want to bring elevator costs down to earth. The report’s author is available to answer questions from reporters, industry professionals, policymakers, or anybody else at stephen@centerforbuilding.org. -
Trash City takes a step towards cleaning up its act
Last year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams released the first draft of his administration’s major zoning proposal, called City of Yes. Unlike most zoning changes, this one isn’t a plan for rezoning any one site or neighborhood, but rather it tweaks zoning rules across the whole city. The idea is to make it a little easier to build everywhere, without concentrating changes in any one area.
The plan’s major elements include much-needed measures like cutting minimum parking requirements for new multifamily development, loosening unit density limits that require all new apartment buildings to more or less have a minimum average unit size of 680 sq. ft., and allowing more density for buildings that include affordable apartments.
After the plan was released, the Center for Building in North America and the Center for Zero Waste Design reached out to the Department of City Planning (DCP)to ask that the zoning code’s requirement for on-floor trash rooms in new multifamily buildings with at least nine units be removed. DCP listened, and last week, when it released its draft zoning text, the provision (ZR 28-12, on pg. 507) was marked to be stricken.
The removal of the requirement is in keeping with the Center for Building’s broader mission of improving the quality and affordability of new multifamily development in the United States through reforms of the details of how buildings are built and maintained, through building and zoning code provisions, technical standards, and other policies. Bigger-picture land use and zoning reforms are critical in allowing the density that American cities need to meet growing urban housing demand and climate goals, but getting the finer details of regulation right ensures that zoned capacity can be built out affordably and to an acceptable level of quality.
The on-floor trash room requirement that has been in the city’s code for decades started from an admirable idea: that residents of all buildings should have convenient access to waste disposal. But the requirement ballooned and morphed over the years into something much more onerous, which adds to both construction and ongoing maintenance costs, and which must ultimately be paid for by residents. On-floor trash rooms also reinforce a waste collection model that is not working to keep the city clean or to encourage waste reduction and recycling, and are falling out of favor in much of the developed world. While developers would still be able to choose to build them after the zoning text amendment is passed, many would likely choose not to, particularly in non-luxury and non-high-rise buildings.
The problems with on-floor trash rooms and chutes start in the design phase of a building’s life. When on-floor waste disposal was first provided in New York City buildings at the start of the 20th century, it consisted of trash chutes that open directly onto common hallways. Over time, these morphed into rooms that can accommodate bulkier items and bins for recycling. Modern accessibility standards caused these rooms to become even more expensive as they grew in size to accommodate people in wheelchairs, and grew in complexity as automatic door openers and occupancy sensors were even required in some cases. Sprinklers, required in every room and in the shaft itself, added to this cost. Each of these requirements make sense on its own, but the sum total grew to be quite expensive compared to the typical alternative of simply having a room on the ground floor or in the cellar where residents can leave their trash.
The plan’s major elements include much-needed measures like cutting minimum parking requirements for new multifamily development, loosening unit density limits that require all new apartment buildings to more or less have a minimum average unit size of 680 sq. ft., and allowing more density for buildings that include affordable apartments.
After the plan was released, the Center for Building in North America and the Center for Zero Waste Design reached out to the Department of City Planning (DCP)to ask that the zoning code’s requirement for on-floor trash rooms in new multifamily buildings with at least nine units be removed. DCP listened, and last week, when it released its draft zoning text, the provision (ZR 28-12, on pg. 507) was marked to be stricken.
The removal of the requirement is in keeping with the Center for Building’s broader mission of improving the quality and affordability of new multifamily development in the United States through reforms of the details of how buildings are built and maintained, through building and zoning code provisions, technical standards, and other policies.