Sure if that's all you care about, it will do that. At the price of making people's lives miserable due to substandard housing if it's done wrong. I said it's a good idea, let's just make sure we do it right.
> At the price of making people's lives miserable due to substandard housing if it's done wrong.
I'm curious to see how Austin will do in the near future by that same metric. More people can afford a place that will let them pay rent, although now at least some of those people will be living in someone else's basement or garage. These may not be very nice places to live, but they may be all some people can afford.
They've also removed the regulation requiring a second way out of a burning 5 story building. Austin faces an increasing number of red flag warnings and has the 5th highest wildfire risk in the US. It remains to be seen what removing that second exit route will cost in the charred corpses of families.
Austin is also cutting corners on permitting which is great news if that was all needless red tape that can be rushed or skipped without cost, but if new apartments built today are (or soon become) deathtraps due to lax code enforcement that could be a major problem down the road.
Austin has already lowered rents which is great, but hopefully it was also done right and it doesn't result in more people being forced into substandard housing or increased deaths. As long as it doesn't, other cities should look into trying some of the same things Austin has done.
The Center for Building in North America has been aggressively pushing for these single stairwell reforms all over the country. Stephen Smith, writer of that report, is the founder of that group as well as the founder of Quantierra a real estate tech company.
The real estate industry is in huge support of this particular reform, and they stand to massively profit from it, but the people who are strongly against it include The International Association of Fire Fighters, the National Association of State Fire Marshals, The International Association of Fire Chiefs, and The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. These are the people who are most informed about the dangers and risks involved and in what safety measures are required to save lives and fight building fires effectively.
The report itself does make some very good arguments like how much safer modern construction has become, and also some rather weak ones (for example it ignores the poor quality of data on fire and smoke related fatalities in the US, as well as important differences between the US and Europe) and I'm not even saying that single stairwell buildings can't ever be made safely, but if safety really wasn't a problem we wouldn't see a lack of support from firefighters who are the actual experts in this space. Until they are convinced of the safety of these reforms real estate developers are going to have a hard time convincing me.
