Flutterby™! : Single Stair layouts

From a Metafilter Post that links to an essay on Software Development, The History of Fire Escapes, comes The Nation: Single-Stair Layouts Are Not Going to Fix the Housing Crisis

If you’ve been around architecture and urbanism circles for the last few years, you might have heard about something called “single-stair” layouts. While not a new concept (it’s been present in European multifamily buildings for a very long time), single-stair apartment buildings have, like upzoning before it, become the latest concept to gain “it will fix our cities” panacea status among a certain type of pragmatic liberal urban pundit. If we build using single-stair, it could lower rents! It could make better streetscapes! It could make America more like Blessed Mother Europe! Wow, the housing crisis is suddenly solved, thanks to this one weird trick!

The author, Kate Wagner, points out that Europe has dramatically different circumstances, like much lower rates of fires, stemming from different ways in which housing gets implemented.

And also mentions Robin Bartram's Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality that looks fascinating.