A new law in Colorado allows the construction of apartment buildings with a single staircase, if the apartment building is small. Such buildings were previously banned by building codes, even though apartment buildings with a single staircase are common in Europe and Japan.
Now, they will be permitted in any city in Colorado with a population greater than 100,000. This change will reduce housing costs and increase the availability of multi-bedroom units.
In an effort to encourage denser development, Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill into law Tuesday to allow smaller apartment buildings in Colorado to be built with a single staircase, instead of the two previously required by building codes.
Backers say fewer internal stairways are a way to significantly lower the building cost for multi-family housing and help ease the state’s high cost of living.
The law applies to Denver, Colorado Springs, Aurora, Fort Collins, Lakewood, Thornton, Arvada, Westminster, Greeley, Pueblo, Boulder and Centennial….Rep. Andrew Boesenecker of Fort Collins, was one of the bill’s main sponsors. He said when developers put up a large building with two stairways and a long hallway, they generally have to assemble many parcels of land into a single project, “which increases land acquisition costs by as much as 40 percent and also increases project durations.”
A nonprofit notes that “Three major U.S. cities allow residential buildings as tall as six stories to have just one staircase: Honolulu, New York, and Seattle. Having only one staircase and less corridor space in a building allows for a broader array of unit designs and sizes.”
Building codes drive up housing costs by encouraging inefficient construction methods. In most industries, productivity has risen enormously since 1947. But not in construction, where productivity has not increased at all over the last 75 years. As Market Watch noted in 2017,”While construction has appeared stuck in a time warp, other sectors have transformed themselves. Consider that in the United States between 1947 and 2010, agriculture achieved cumulative real growth in its productivity of 1,510% and manufacturing 760%…U.S. construction-sector productivity is lower today than it was in 1968.”
High-cost, low-productivity methods are promoted by federal housing regulations and subsidies:
construction productivity in 2020 was 40% lower than in 1970, even though productivity in other sectors of the economy more than doubled during that time. While local regulatory policy is unquestionably a factor in this decline, restrictions on the methods of housing production also affect the supply of affordable housing. Prefabricated factory-built housing costs about one-third as much as traditional “stick-built housing,” but it constitutes just 10% of new single-family home construction today. In the 1970s, it was 60%. That dramatic decline is thanks to monopolistic government policies, from mortgage subsidies to federal safety standards, that irrationally favor stick-built methods over factory-built. To make more housing available to more Americans at lower prices, the federal government must get out of the way and allow housing construction to modernize the same way other sectors of the economy have.
Federal policies promote “‘stick-built housing,’ when buildings are constructed on-site by traditional construction methods. This method requires highly skilled, frequently unionized workers to produce homes on-site. Pre-fabricated factory-built housing, by contrast, costs about 1/3 as much per square foot”:
the prevalence of stick-built housing is a function of monopolistic behavior by construction companies and government policy, particularly the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This happened in a couple of steps.
First, HUD developed Section 235 in 1968, a program that substantially subsidized mortgages on stick-built but not factory-built homes. Given the relative inefficiency of stick-built production, this program effectively subsidized a low-productivity technology at the cost of other, more efficient production methods.
Second, HUD and NAHB pushed the National Manufactured Housing Construction and Safety Standards Act of 1974 through Congress. The act effectively operates as a national zoning ordinance and restricts the production of factory-built homes substantially by requiring such homes to meet certain standards. At the time, factory-built housing competed with stick-built housing largely in low-density areas, many of which had no zoning laws to begin with. Before factory-built housing could make headway into urban areas, it was strangled in the crib.
