A Closer Look at Kirkwood’s Building Code

There has long been a lament amongst the Kirkwood intelligentsia that maybe adding more homes is good in theory, but the development we’ve actually gotten in the recent past are of the wrong type. They’re too big and too expensive. In other words, they’re ruining the charm of Kirkwood while doing nothing to address its inaccessibility. “Where is the promised missing middle?” they clamor (the “middle” in question representing their ideal for both the size of the buildings they’d like to see and the class of people they’d like to see living in them). And the data shows that these complaints are not entirely unfounded. Multifamily buildings all across the United States really are getting bigger and the increasing cost of shelter has long been a focus of this blog.

In response, many attempts have been made at coercing developers into bringing their plans into better alignment with this platonic ideal of what new development should look like.

On the size front, where Kirkwood’s strict zoning code means that developers are forced to seek discretionary approval from the City Council, these attempts have found some “success”. The James was originally 174-units before the Council forced the developers back to the drawing board where they revised the project down to the 152-unit iteration currently wrapping up construction.

Efforts to reel in the rents on these new developments however, have been decidedly less effective, often broaching on comical.¹ The night the Council approved the Kirkwood Apartments, Council Member Gibbons, a prospective candidate for Mayor in next Spring’s election, attempted to harangue the developer into agreeing to lower future rents. Council Member Zimmer, meanwhile, encouraged the developers to explore using cheaper materials so that they might offer cheaper rents, citing the developer’s economic self-interest rather than Gibbon’s proposed shame-induced altruism.

Without any leverage to wield, neither of these efforts worked, Gibbon’s, because it probably would have made the project financially inviable (housing development is a tight margin business) and Zimmer’s because it would have at least cut into those margins (developers already choose the quality-cost pairing that nets them the most money after meeting the requirements of the ARB and building code, so any forced shift along that curve necessarily results in both deadweight loss and a redistribution of surplus from the developers to the renters, which developers obviously don’t care for).

But I really do think that Zimmer’s idea at least has some merit. Design decisions drive costs in the few multifamily buildings that do get approved in Kirkwood and those costs really do get passed down to consumers (even if overburdensome zoning is the main culprit of Kirkwood’s inaccessibility). Instead of trying to convince developers to act counter to their economic self-interest, though, I think it’s worth looking at ways in which our building code drives behavior that is counter to everyone’s self-interest —developers, tenants, and city council members alike— and essentially bans all the “missing middle” projects (both in terms of size and cost) that everyone says they want to see.

The Building Code Explained

Before I get into specifics, I want to note that I will be drawing heavily from Michael Eliason (the guy who basically single-handedly brought this issue to the forefront over the past couple of years) and the Seattle-based think-tank that he founded, “Larch Lab“. He’s a great follow on twitter, and almost all the pictures I’m using from this piece are pirated from his paper “Unlocking Development with Point Access Blocks” which is short and absolutely worth the read.

So, what the hell am I talking about? Well, Kirkwood, like municipalities all over the United States, has adopted a version of the International Building Code as our building code (rather than reinventing the wheel and trying to write our own). Kirkwood uses the 2015 edition of the IBC, as does Webster, while St. Louis, uses the newer 2018 version, but the specific version of the building code doesn’t matter that much. What matters is that they each contain one very costly section pertaining to points of egress.

Section 1006.3 of the 2015 IBC and section 1015.1 of the 2018 IBC both state the same thing: Buildings must have at least two separate exits, remote from each other, to provide alternative means of egress incase of fire or emergency.

When you look at what that means in practice, it essentially says that all buildings over three stories have to use what’s known as “double loaded corridor design,” with units flanking both sides of the building and a long hallway running down the middle connecting a stairway at either end. And indeed, when you look at Kirkwood’s recent multifamily buildings —everything from the substantial James, Aria, and Kirkwood Apartments, to the much more modest four-story 12 and 14-unit trio of Savoy developments along Madison, they all use this design. They have to! It’s the law.

This design has become ubiquitous in the US in the years since it became broadly mandatory in the early 20th-Century so you probably haven’t given it much thought, but it actually has several drawbacks. First, that long dark hallway is a ton of wasted space that makes buildings bigger and more costly to heat and cool without adding any extra homes or amenities. This in turn makes the buildings more expensive to construct. Developers then charge higher rents to tenants and higher prices to prospective condo buyers to recoup those higher costs.

Double-loaded buildings also come with higher environmental costs. The materials required to construct the wasted hall space and the resources required to heat and cool them all add to these projects’ carbon footprint both before and after they are constructed. And because most units in large double-loaded buildings only face one side or other of the building, they have fewer windows and no possibility of using cross ventilation to reduce HVAC costs in-unit.

Finally, double loaded corridor designs force architects to utilize inefficient floor plans to ensure that the bedroom and living room at least get natural lighting, making the quality of life for residents lower and reducing the number of multi-bedroom units. And then, because you only have windows facing one direction, if you happen to be in a unit that is on the street-side of the building, ensuring that the bedroom has a window means that it’s also located in the loudest portion of the unit.

So what’s the alternative? Let me introduce you to the long lost art of point-access apartments.

An Introduction to Point Access

Point access buildings are ones where all the units (typically no more than four per floor) open onto a central stairwell (occasionally accompanied by an elevator). These buildings can stand on their own, or be placed next to one another (the first image below). They can even be organized into a ring with courtyard in the middle (in fact they are all over Europe). In any case they come with several advantages.

Smaller Buildings & Fine Grained Development

First, legalizing point-access buildings incentivizes developers to build smaller. They don’t have to fit a hallway into their project, and don’t have to accommodate a second entrance to the building. And because the developer is spending less money on wasted space, they can make buildings with smaller unit counts pencil out financially (and charge lower rents after building them). This also leads to buildings that are much thinner with more green space interspersed between them compared to the thick buildings we’re used to in the US, which in turn leads to less heat-island effect than we get from our current mode of building.

More Efficient Floor Plans

And because point-access projects are cheaper and have more windows, single-stair buildings allow for more family-oriented two, three, and four-bedroom units. The problem is that when designing a building, every bedroom gets a window, but in double-loaded buildings there are relatively few windows to go around even though buildings have a lot of square-footage. To solve this and maximize profit, developers design lots of 1-bedroom units and fill the extra space in the back of each unit with added bathrooms and larger kitchens. Point-access buildings on the other hand get you a lot more exterior-wall space per square-foot which translates to larger units with more bedrooms for families. This problem has only grown since the real-estate bubble burst and financing residential projects became more difficult:

Better for the Environment

And finally, because the buildings are smaller and you’re wasting less space, you’re also wasting less materials to build that space and wasting less energy to heat and cool that space once it’s complete. And since you have more cross ventilation via windows facing multiple directions, there are more days of the year that you don’t have to cool your space at all.

What About Fire?

But what about the whole point of the current two-stair regime, fire safety? The expert consensus seems to be that most of the safety benefits of multiple egress regulations are rendered pretty marginal by the context in which they’re applied.

First, the same IBC that requires multiple egresses requires new multifamily buildings to have sprinkler systems which dramatically cuts down on any fire risk right off the bat. This is of course not true of single family homes which are not governed by the IBC and which account for a disproportionate number of fire deaths. In fact, in the US. 84% of the fatal home fire injuries occurred in one- or two-family dwellings, despite the fact that they only comprise approximately 71% of the total homes. The remaining 16% of fatal home fires that are presumably occurring in multifamily homes are at least partially occurring in older multifamily buildings that lack the now standard sprinkler systems.

Additionally, because the two-stair requirement incentivizes developers to build big buildings with long hallways, residents are often further away from either point of egress than they would be in a point-access building where all the units are right next to stairs.

And anecdotally, if you think about it, when people travel to Europe, it’s not really like you hear about them worry about dying in a fire. If our way of doing things was really that superior, you think you’d hear more discussion of the looming danger in other countries.

There’s a Better Way

All those advantages are made illegal or impractical thanks to our exclusive use of the IBC as Kirkwood’s building code, but there’s no reason we couldn’t change that. First, as I just said, these aren’t the rules other countries use. In fact, it’s basically just Canada, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and the good ole USA.

But even within the United States, several communities, including New York City, Seattle, and Honolulu, have decided that the egress section of the IBC was misguided and have written their own egress code. Then, earlier this month, the California Senate sent a bill called AB 835 to the Governor’s desk directing the State Fire Marshal to research and develop standards for single-stairway multi-family buildings, bringing the country’s most populous state into the point-access fold.

It would be a big lift for Kirkwood of St. Louis to strike out on our own and try and develop new standards for our buildings, but it strikes me as relatively easy to simply copy and paste the changes that have been effective elsewhere. A little bit of initiative on this front could yield smaller, more sustainable buildings with larger family-sized units at an attainable price-point. That’s an awful lot of wins you could notch for residents just by changing a few lines of building code text around.

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1. Longtime readers will of course know that housing is getting more expensive not because developers are somehow more greedy now than they used to be and building more expensive units accordingly, but instead because demand for new homes has grown while the supply of new homes in Kirkwood remains relatively flat, so developers who do get approval to build build for the most profitable demographic they can and basically get to basically name their price and watch people fight over the scraps that are available. As a thought experiment, if you were looking to rent in Downtown Kirkwood right now, basically your only option is something in the Kirkwood Station Plaza complex, but once The James is complete sometime next year, that building will be the nicest rental option in town demanding the highest rents and the Kirkwood Station apartments will almost assuredly filter down into the second tier. Then when the Kirkwood Apartments come online and they face even more competition, they’ll have to adjust prices again to keep attracting new residents (otherwise, why not just rent in the brand new building with a pool) If we were building lots of apartments this filtering would occur much more frequently than once every two decades and would penetrate the market more deeply. ↩︎