The province of British Columbia made the following announcement this week:

The Province has updated the BCBC to remove the [building] code requirement for a second egress, or exit, stairwell per floor in buildings up to six storeys. This change will make it possible to build housing projects on smaller lots and in different configurations, while allowing more flexibility for multi-bedroom apartments, more density within areas of transit-oriented developments and the potential to improve energy efficiency in buildings. Previously, the BCBC called for at least two egress stairwells in buildings three storeys and higher.

This is meaningful progress. And BC is the leading the way in Canada. But from a global perspective, we are not leading the way. This is us catching up.

As part of this building code change, the province commissioned a report on single egress stair building designs. In this report, they looked at various jurisdictions from around the world:

Their non-exhaustive findings:

There are at least 30 jurisdictions with SES building design requirements that permit midrise buildings with a building height of at least 5 or 6 storeys. In addition, the Center for Building in North America (www.centerforbuilding.org) reports that 8 US states have passed legislation into law, or are reviewing possible options for doing so, to allow larger SES buildings when their Building Code is next revised. In most cases these revisions are intended to allow SES buildings of up to 6 storeys.

For example, Seattle already allows up to 6 storeys. Belgium, New Zealand, and Australia allow up to 9 storeys (driven by a maximum height in meters). And Finland allows up to 18 storeys, according to the report.

Though keep in mind that building codes are complicated and often have frustrating gray areas. There may be other requirements that need to be met in order to achieve these heights.

It's great to see BC making these moves. Now watch for other provinces to follow suit.

It is an overwhelmingly positive thing for cities when you can somehow figure out how to turn a site like this (which looks to have been a single-family home):

Into 13 homes and new ground-floor retail that looks like this (non-Google street view images can be found here):

This particular example is at 752 High Street in Thornbury, which is an inner suburb of Melbourne. Designed by Gardiner Architects, the build has 4 floors of residential, a 5th floor rooftop amenity, and a single elevator with a single wraparound staircase. It was also constructed out of cross-laminated timber.

For more about that process, here's a short video:

If you watch the video, you'll hear the architect talk about how his firm had been working on this project for about 8 or 9 years. I have no idea the backstory and I'm not about to speculate, but clearly 8-9 years is far too long for only 13 new homes. And the reality is that we often don't make it easy to build this kind of infill housing.

Broadly speaking, if you're trying to encourage this scale of housing, I think at a minimum you want to look at 3 things: (1) the planning permissions need to be flexible and as-of-right, (2) you need to look at the local building codes to see if there are any obstacles in place that don't necessarily make sense for this typology, and (3) you want to look at the impact fees being levied.

It's hard not to imagine our cities being better off having more apartments like High Street.

I'm not sure how much you can actually glean from this Australian Bureau of Statistics data (taken from this recent New Geography article):

The data was collected on August 20, 2021 and, at that time, there were still a number of pandemic lockdowns in place. But consider the fact that during the last census (2016), Sydney's "work @ home" share was only 4.9% and that its transit share was 26.2%.

Where Sydney is sitting today is obviously somewhere between where it was in 2016 and where it was in 2021. Who knows where exactly things stabilize -- that is largely unknowable -- but at least I got to use "Sydneysider" in a blog post title.