This is Part 3 of our series on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. [Part 1 covers the bill overview. Part 2 covers the pattern book program and Cincinnati’s BuildReady initiative.]
If there is one provision in this bill that has architects paying attention, it is Section 103: Federal Guidelines for Point-Access Block Buildings. To understand why it matters, you have to understand the building it is designed to replace.
The 5-Over-1
You know these buildings. Five stories of wood-framed apartments on a concrete ground floor, stretching the full width of a city block. Flat facade. Interchangeable from Portland to Charlotte to Cincinnati. They are sprouting along every corridor where the zoning allows multifamily, and at my engagement meetings in Mt. Airy, all I hear from residents is that they hate them.
The 5-over-1 is not a failure of imagination. It is a math problem created by building codes.
U.S. codes require two exit stairwells connected by a corridor for almost any residential building above three stories. Architects call this the double-loaded corridor: a long, windowless hallway with apartment doors on both sides. That hallway generates zero rent. It consumes 15 to 20 percent of the building’s floor area. It must be heated, cooled, lit, and maintained.
This is Part 3 of our series on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. [Part 1 covers the bill overview. Part 2 covers pattern books and Cincinnati’s BuildReady initiative.]
Stand on Vine Street in Corryville and look north. Five stories of wood-framed apartments on a concrete pedestal. Flat facade. Fiber cement panels in three shades of gray. It stretches the full width of the block. It could be in Portland. It could be in Charlotte. It could be anywhere, and that is the problem.
This building exists because of a hallway.
Why Every New Apartment Building Looks the Same
U.S. building codes require two exit stairwells connected by a corridor for residential buildings above three stories. Architects call this the double-loaded corridor. Long windowless hallway. Apartment doors on both sides. Hotel layout without the room service.
That hallway consumes 15 to 20 percent of the building’s floor area. It generates zero rent. It must be heated, cooled, lit, cleaned, and maintained. It is the single most expensive piece of dead space in American residential construction.
The only way to absorb the cost is to build big. A developer needs a massive footprint to spread the hallway expense across enough units to make the numbers work. That means assembling an entire city block. That means demolishing a half-dozen existing buildings to get the land. The result is a monolithic facade that replaces the fine-grain variety that made the street worth walking in the first place.
Two consequences follow.
First, every apartment faces one direction. Units line up along the hallway with windows on a single wall. Cross-ventilation is impossible. Interior rooms are dark. Three-bedroom layouts are geometrically painful to fit into these single-aspect tubes. Four-bedroom layouts are essentially fiction.
Second, the streetscape dies. A block-long building with a repetitive facade and a parking garage mouth replaces the rhythm of individual storefronts, porches, and setback variations. At my engagement meetings in Mt. Airy, residents do not complain about density. They complain about monotony. They are right.
The double-loaded corridor is not a design choice. It is a code mandate. And the code is about to change.
The Point-Access Block
Section 103 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act directs HUD to issue model code language for “point-access block residential buildings.” The definition: multifamily buildings with a single internal stairway, up to six stories.
The concept. One central stair. Two to four units per floor, opening directly off the landing. No corridor.
That is it. That is the entire circulation system. Everything that was hallway becomes apartment.
This is standard construction across Europe. It is how Vienna builds social housing. It is how Copenhagen, Berlin, and Barcelona have built mid-rise residential for a century. Seattle adopted single-stair provisions locally in 2023. The federal bill pushes toward national adoption by directing HUD to encourage the International Code Council to write point-access blocks into the IBC.
Three things change when the hallway disappears.
Through-Units
When an apartment no longer stops at the corridor wall, it can span the full width of the building. Windows on the front and back. Daylight in every room. Open a window on each side and the air moves through the unit without a compressor running.
I design to Passive House standards. A dual-aspect unit with real cross-ventilation is not just better architecture. It is measurably lower energy consumption. Passive cooling through airflow instead of mechanical systems. Reduced HVAC sizing. Lower utility loads for residents who are already stretching to cover rent. The building code was literally preventing us from designing efficient buildings.
(The irony is not lost on me.)
Fine-Grain Streets
A point-access block does not need a city block’s worth of land. The footprint is compact. One central stair serving four to six units on a floor plate that can be as narrow as 25 feet.
Twenty-five feet. That is the standard lot width in Over-the-Rhine, Northside, Walnut Hills, Mt. Auburn, and most of Cincinnati’s pre-war neighborhoods. A point-access block slots into a single existing lot. Four to six units. Matches the width and rhythm of its neighbors.
Five of these buildings side by side, designed by five different architects for five different owners, produces a street that reads like a neighborhood instead of a project. Instead of one corporate developer assembling a block for a monolith, a half-dozen local developers each build one building. Each building is different. Each owner has a stake. The architecture returns to the scale that made these streets interesting in the first place.
Want to learn more? Here’s Michael Eliason’s expert report on Point Access Blocks.
Better Math
Building efficiency jumps from roughly 80 percent in a double-loaded corridor to over 90 percent in a point-access block. The difference is the hallway that no longer exists.
On a 5,000-square-foot floor plate, that is 500 additional rentable square feet per floor. Five stories. 2,500 square feet total. At $1.50 per square foot per month, that is $45,000 per year in additional revenue from a building that costs less to construct because there is less hallway to frame, insulate, and condition.
That efficiency gain is what allows a small local developer to compete on an infill lot. The 5-over-1 requires a balance sheet from out of town. The point-access block works at the scale of someone who actually lives here.
What Has to Change Locally
The federal bill creates guidelines and grant funding for pilot projects. It does not override the Ohio Building Code. For point-access blocks to be built in Cincinnati, the state or the city must adopt the model code language that HUD develops.
Ohio adopts building codes at the state level. The path forward is either a state amendment recognizing single-stair buildings under specified fire-safety conditions, or a local pilot funded by the federal grants the bill authorizes. Cincinnati’s Connected Communities overlay districts are the logical testing ground: multifamily allowed by right, low or no parking minimums, lot widths of 25 to 30 feet. The conditions already exist.
The code just needs to catch up to the lots.
What We Are Designing
Trilobite Design is already incorporating point-access block principles into our infill housing work. We know the lot conditions. We know the code constraints. We know what a narrow building needs to do structurally, thermally, and spatially to be worth living in.
The single-stair mid-rise solves the design problem and the economics problem simultaneously. Density the city needs on the lots the city has, without the monolithic footprint that neighborhoods reject.
If you are sitting on a narrow infill lot that seemed undevelopable under the current rules, that calculation is changing.