A bill recently sent to Gov. Josh Stein by the North Carolina legislature could be a small step in addressing the state’s housing supply gap. An added benefit: Getting more housing built could improve the state’s fire safety.
North Carolina is projected to gain 5 percent more households between 2024 and 2029, adding to a growing need, according to a study commissioned by NC Realtors and the NC Chamber Foundation. That same study estimated that 322,360 rental units and 442,118 units for sale would need to be constructed during those five years to close the gap.
North Carolina isn’t the only state facing this issue; the nation is short by an estimated 7 million housing units, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.
This year, several municipalities across the country enacted zoning reforms — from parking requirements to building codes — to improve the affordability and availability of housing, according to Pew. The research center found that cities that added to their housing supply, often as a result of reforming local zoning codes, succeeded in keeping rent increases low.
While recent moves by the legislature haven’t reworked codes entirely, House Bill 926 does bar additional local zoning or development regulations.
Specifically it prevents cities or municipalities from:
- Setting minimum structure sizes beyond existing Residential Code
- Requiring parking spaces bigger than 9′ × 20′ (except for disability, parallel or diagonal)
- Demanding extra fire access roads beyond what current fire codes mandate
- Imposing pavement design standards that are more stringent than NCDOT minimums
“We’ve seen that overall, apartments have been the most effective way to improve housing affordability,” said Alex Horowitz, a researcher for Pew’s housing policy initiative. “Cities that have added a lot of apartments have seen housing affordability improve, but sometimes fire safety concerns can hold that back.”
And even as cities eased codes, it turns out that building faster doesn’t have to mean compromising on fire safety, he said.
Newer buildings, fewer fires
It was the question of changing regulations’ impact on fire safety that prompted a recent report by Pew co-authored by Horowitz.
“We’ve got building codes, we’ve got fire codes, we’ve got zoning codes, permitting processes, and there are all these pieces that fit together, but we wanted to know what housing types are the safest,” Horowitz said.
The report found that “multifamily buildings constructed since 2000 enjoy far better fire safety outcomes than other types of housing, because additional safety measures, such as self-closing doors, fire-safe materials, and sprinklers have been adopted widely.”
Key findings in the report included:
- Modern multifamily housing, meaning built after 2000, has a fire death rate one-sixth the rate of single-family homes and multifamily housing built before that date.
- The fire death rate for modern multifamily buildings was less than one-fourth the rate than in single-family homes built after that date.
- Six percent of Americans live in modern apartments, but only 1 percent of residential fire deaths in 2023 occurred in these buildings.
“We saw that modern apartment buildings have the best fire safety record of any housing, and that was true in North Carolina,” Horowitz said.
Looking at fire deaths in North Carolina during 2023, researchers found that the fire death rate for single-family homes was 9.3 per million. For apartments built pre-2000, the rate was 9.1 per million in 2023. When looking at modern apartment buildings built since 2000, there was not a single fire death in 2023, the report found.
“That housing is actually 9 percent of the housing stock in North Carolina. So when we’re talking about fire safety, we’re really talking about something that’s a problem in older buildings,” Horowitz said. “If we’re going to improve fire safety, the solution is the same as it is for improving housing affordability — enabling more apartments to get built.”
While limiting additional restrictions by municipalities or cities is a start, there are a variety of solutions North Carolina can look to. North Carolina has not yet passed any laws allowing apartments anywhere that commercial uses are allowed, curtailed parking mandates, or passed a law to allow accessory dwelling units as 18 other states have, Horowitz said.
“Lots of other states are moving ahead to allow more homes, improve affordability, reduce homelessness,” Horowitz said, adding that the new buildings also have the added benefit of reducing fire fatalities.
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
