05/06/2026
One of the most beautiful features of old European neighborhoods are the rows of quaint, walk-up apartments that are the backbone of walkable neighborhoods. They help create a community where people can exit their front door and walk to a local cafรฉ or market without getting in their car. Unfortunately, these neighborhoods are hard to find in the United States, where these types of apartment buildings are exceedingly rare.
Uytae Lee is the founder of About Here, an adjunct journalism professor at UBC, and a BC Housing Board commissioner. As an urban planner and videographer, he is passionate about sharing stories about our cities.
In a video you can watch below, he explains why regulations in North America have made these quaint walk-up apartments, known by architects as point access blocks, nearly impossible to build.
โQuaint walk-up apartments โฆ are a beloved feature in cities around the world,โ Lee says in his video entitled โWhy North Americans Canโt Have Nice Apartments.โ โTheyโre inviting and full of character. But, here in North America, they are not allowed to be built today. Instead, our apartments are big and imposing, often stretching across the entire block and the reason why it really comes down to one reason: staircases.โ
The problem is that one stairway in a point access block allows access to all apartments. This became a problem in the late 1800s when fires were commonplace in urban areas worldwide and people were more likely to die in a fire with only one exit route. So, in the U.S. and Canada, they created new regulations that made it so all buildings over two to three stories had to have two staircases to allow them to exit during a fire.
โStaircases take up a lot of space and fitting two of them in a small building means that there is much less usable floor space on every floor,โ Lee says in the video. โAs a result, developers here construct much larger buildings so that the staircases and hallways take up a much smaller proportion of the overall building. Itโs why apartments in North America, in general, are much bigger and wider than their European counterparts.โ
But there are fires in Europe, too. Why did they stop short of requiring multiple staircases in apartment buildings on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? Instead of changing the floorplans on new buildings, Europeans opted to require fireproof materials in new building construction. A big reason why the U.S. and Canada opted for larger buildings over fireproofing was because they had better access to materials and the new direction aligned with the move towards suburban sprawl.
The two-staircase regulations in the U.S also made it harder to build units greater than one bedroom because the buildings needed long hallways which reduced the number of layout options.
