Opinion · Housing & Public Safety

Virginia Wants to Cut a Fire Escape From Your Future Home. Don’t Let It.

A housing shortage is real. So is the danger of leaving residents with only one way out.

Virginia is on the verge of a quiet but consequential change to its building code. The state’s Board of Housing and Community Development recently advanced a proposal to allow residential buildings up to four stories tall to be built with a single stairwell instead of two.

The pitch is simple: one stairwell means smaller footprints, more buildings on more lots, more housing. In a state grappling with a genuine shortage, that sounds like common sense. It is also the latest in a string of top-down mandates that treat a statewide building code as a housing policy lever — overriding local judgment, bypassing the communities that will live with the consequences, and sidelining the safety professionals who know the risks best. It isn’t common sense. And rushing this change before the safety questions are answered could cost lives.

The people who run into burning buildings are saying stop

When the International Association of Fire Fighters opposes a building code change, policymakers should pay attention. Andrew Panetlis, a vice president of the IAFF, has been blunt: “Safety is the primary issue, not only for the residents in those buildings, but our firefighters responding to emergencies as well.”

Picture what he’s describing. A fire breaks out on the third floor. Residents above smell smoke and rush for the stairs — the only stairs — pushing down. Firefighters need to push up the same stairwell to reach the fire and rescue anyone trapped. The result is a bottleneck. In a fire, bottlenecks kill.

Virginia’s own Single Exit Stair Study Group heard from fire service professionals who concluded that this congestion problem “will be very difficult to address even with additional safety features.” Sprinklers help. Smoke ventilation helps. Neither creates a second exit where none exists.

There’s another overlooked detail: at four stories and above, emergency escape windows — a critical backup when a stairwell is blocked — become impractical. At the very height this proposal targets, a key safety redundancy disappears.

The evidence cited doesn’t fit Virginia’s reality

Advocates point to a Pew study finding that fire death rates in New York City’s single-stair buildings from 2012 to 2024 matched those of other residential buildings. Four fire-related deaths across New York and Seattle in that period, they argue, proves the concept is safe.

But New York City has one of the most sophisticated fire departments in the world, with response times most of Virginia will never match. That comparison says little about buildings in Southside Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley, or rural communities where volunteer departments cover vast distances. Virginia’s own advisory group flagged this directly: the challenge facing small fire departments is fundamentally different from what the New York data captures.

The historical data also has a blind spot. Virginia’s advisory proceedings specifically flagged lithium-ion battery fires from e-bikes and electric vehicles as a fast-growing hazard — fires that burn hotter and spread faster than conventional ones. Locking in a code change based on data that predates this threat is a gamble with other people’s lives.

Virginia’s own process isn’t finished

The advisory group Virginia convened to study this question never reached a formal recommendation. The competing data, variation in local fire capacity, and unresolved questions about emerging hazards prevented the experts from reaching consensus. They also noted interest in awaiting guidance from the National Fire Protection Association.

The Board is moving ahead of its own expert process — and doing so through a uniform statewide code that gives localities no ability to opt out or adapt to their own conditions. A rural county with a volunteer fire department and long response times has no more say than an urban jurisdiction with a full-time department around the corner. That’s the nature of top-down policymaking: one size, applied everywhere, decided by people who won’t be the ones trapped on the fourth floor.

Building codes are not easy to undo — structures built under relaxed standards will stand for 50 or 100 years. If this change is adopted prematurely and a tragedy results, the lesson will come too late.

Single-stairwell design, under carefully specified conditions, may eventually earn a place in Virginia’s building code. But the expert process is unfinished, the fire service is sounding alarms, and the evidence doesn’t yet translate to Virginia’s diverse communities. The Board should pause, complete the advisory process, and ensure any changes are grounded in the full weight of evidence — not the urgency of the moment. Virginia’s future residents deserve a home they can escape from.