Single-stair reform has recently been gaining momentum in legislatures and city councils across the country. In much of the world, multifamily residential buildings with one staircase are commonplace. Yet, with a few exceptions, such buildings are illegal above three stories in the United States, a product of outdated fire safety regulations. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when American cities experienced frequent fires in poorly designed buildings, codes were rightfully updated to, among other regulations, require a second staircase for emergency egress above three stories.

But today, fire safety measures and technology have improved, with the advent of effective features like sprinklers and self-closing doors helping reduce fire risks. Compared to these modern measures, requiring a second staircase above three stories does little to improve safety. However, they can increase building costs by 10 percent, or make developments on smaller, irregular lots entirely infeasible. Multifamily construction is consequently limited to larger developments, often with ​“double-loaded” standard designs that face frequent local opposition. These regulatory effects can significantly raise the cost of housing construction or depress it completely.

During the 2024 legislative session, House Majority Leader Jason Rojas (D-East Hartford) proposed pursuing single-stair reform in Connecticut. Bolstered by housing advocates and builders, the reform was heard by the Public Safety and Security Committee as part of a larger bill, SB 343.

Members of the fire professional community (especially local fire marshals) strongly opposed it, despite ample empirical evidence of the reform being safe. The pressure worked, and the bill never made it out of committee. However, continued support from leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk) and Governor Lamont’s office, helped single-stair reform ultimately become a last-minute provision of the implementer bill, passed at the end of the 2024 session.

While initially a win for pro-homes progress in Connecticut, the reform’s hasty inclusion in the spending omnibus bill forestalled any larger effort to educate the public, legislators, and administrators on the issue. With many fire professionals feeling alienated by the legislative changes, the reform entered the administrative process with limited vocal support among the state’s fire and code governance. As advocates supporting the reform, our initial failure to build allies among these communities highlights the need for advocates to extend their understanding and messaging to the bureaucratic side of code reform. Legislative reforms may be necessary, but building support administratively is an indispensable first step.

Once Connecticut’s single-stair reform entered the regulatory process, it faced hurdles at every step throughout its attempted implementation, largely spurred by continued opposition from fire professionals. The 2024 legislation had instructed the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), a state agency that executes core state functions such as overseeing building and fire regulations, to devise new codes that would allow additional residential occupancies to be served safely with a single stair in ​“municipalities in which the fire service is sufficient.”

DAS initially released a draft proposal for public comment that permitted up to six stories of single-stair housing, but with poison pills including excessively restrictive fire service requirements that would have prevented any meaningful usage. This proposal technically complied with the 2024 legislation, but would have effected little to no actual change in creating more homes due to its unworkable requirements.

In response, RPA released an open letter, and Pro-Homes CT published an op-ed encouraging a more workable reform, supplementing pushback from other advocates. In those letters, we strengthened our case by relying on citing recent national research from partners at The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America, underscoring the benefits for local advocates of collaborating with the emerging national advocacy community focused on building codes.

At the same time, DAS evidently faced immense pressure against even that proposed reform, primarily from firefighters and local fire marshals, who argued that it posed a safety risk by reducing the number of stairwells for evacuation or fire crew access. While some of these concerns were undoubtedly well-meaning, they are not backed up by data, which finds that modern single-stair buildings are exceptionally safe. Any such buildings would be built with modern safety measures that make today’s multifamily buildings much safer than those of the past.

Fire danger in Connecticut is primarily found in single-family homes, which have a fire death rate six times that of modern apartments due to their comparatively loose requirements and lack of inspections. Regardless of these facts, the single-stair debate in Connecticut lacked enough credible voices articulating these data-driven points within the building code and fire professional space. Ensuring that clear support comes from these critical stakeholders (which, we slowly learned, does exist) through any code reform process is a key lesson learned.

In response to pressure it faced on all sides during the public comment period, DAS released a sensible compromise in late 2025: the updated codes would approve single-stair buildings up to four stories, without any major poison pills. While less impactful than most single-stair reforms around the country that permit six stories, the compromise still constituted meaningful progress that complied with the 2024 law mandating a reform. Demonstrating the sincerity and moderation of this compromise, the Joint Council of Connecticut Fire Service Organizations released a statement indicating acceptance of the new language. In short, a robust public debate and input from experts within and beyond DAS led to a moderate compromise reform. The process worked.

Yet, the reform still had to clear a final hurdle before becoming law: endorsement from Connecticut’s Legislative Regulation Review Committee (LRRC), a relatively obscure, bipartisan committee in the General Assembly tasked with approving new regulations across multiple state responsibilities. Behind the scenes, and unbeknownst to advocates, local fire professionals had been lobbying the committee’s members to oppose the reform, likely repeating similar unproven notions about its dangers as they had in 2024 and 2025. This strategy worked.

Numerous members of the committee (the exact numbers are unclear) indicated opposition to the single-stair change, and DAS did not push back, instead entirely nixing the reform to get the rest of the 2026 building codes passed. The Regulation Review Committee did not officially reject the measure (which could only be overturned by the General Assembly), but essentially vetoed it through informal signaling, all without an avenue for the public to comment.

Once it became clear that the single-stair reform would prevent the rest of the codes from being approved, legislative leadership conceded to the committee’s decision. On February 26, 2026, to ensure legal compliance, the Connecticut General Assembly was forced to repeal its 2024 law that initiated the change, constituting a shocking setback for pro-homes reforms in the state. By using its approval power to kill single-stair reform, the Legislative Regulation Review Committee took a step that was far outside of its normal bounds.

According to the committee’s website, it exists to review proposed regulations and ensure they ​“do not contravene the legislative intent” or conflict with existing laws. The committee does not have the authority to legislate or to determine whether reforms are ​“right or wrong”, yet that is exactly what they did, ignoring the work done by DAS to reach a compromise. By refusing to pass single-stair reform, the committee flouted the intent of the 2024 legislation.

The fall of single-stair reform in Connecticut exemplifies the structural challenges that housing reforms can face during implementation, even after being passed into law. These challenges are especially present with reforming building codes—a complex policy area where administrative processes are often opaque and knowledge among legislators and the public is low. The protracted set of approvals and reviews that single-stair reform was subjected to presented several points of potential failure, some of which lacked transparency. With such complex processes at play, widespread education is the best way to ensure that reforms succesfully make it through.

An intricate, multistage implementation process, combined with the complexity of building codes, makes it easy for political pressure—or even bad-faith fear mongering—to override basic research and data. To combat these challenges, advocates hoping to spur building code reform should educate stakeholders at multiple levels. We must educate the public, legislators, and administrators (especially in the fire and codes communities) on the rationales and arguments behind reform as a path towards more housing, while elucidating the process of implementation (which may be very opaque) and its key stakeholders (who are often low-visibility administrative officials). By understanding the process, then educating and mobilizing the right actors, we can craft strategies for reform that effectively navigate the legislative and administrative sides of change.

Despite Connecticut’s initial setback, however, the effort for single-stair reform continues. Coincidentally, the International Code Council, which oversees the nation’s model codes adopted by Connecticut, held its 2027 Code Hearings in Hartford on April 20, 2026, discussing and finalizing the adoption of the next three-year model codes. Members of the Pro-Homes CT team spoke in favor of a proposal to adopt a four-story single-stair code that is nearly identical to DAS’s final compromise proposal. It was debated and adopted by the voting membership and will be included in the finalized 2027 model code. Following this national change, it is a matter of when, not if, single-stair reform will be adopted in Connecticut.