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NFPA 101
Life safety in new and existing structures
Most multistory apartment buildings in the United States and Canada require two means of egress, which usually means two exit stairs for occupants to leave a building during a fire or other emergency. But there's a push underway across North America to reduce that number to one exit stair, driven in part by global design and building trends. Multistory apartment buildings with a single exit stair already exist in countries around the world, and the approach is beginning to catch on here as well. Seattle's building code, for instance, allows some buildings up to six stories to be served by one exit stair.
Proponents of single-exit design point to a number of reasons for eliminating the second exit from multistory apartment buildings. Having to design for just a single exit, they argue, can result in buildings with smaller, more flexible footprints that fit on smaller parcels of land, resulting in a more efficient use of space, lower building costs, and, at least in theory, more affordable housing for buyers or renters. The popularity of this approach in Europe and elsewhere is often cited as proof that the second stair is unnecessary and simply takes up rentable space, which in turn drives up associated costs. While there is undoubtedly a host of critical issues around affordable housing in much of the world, it's doubtful whether eliminating an exit stair is a suitable approach to helping solve the...