Exactly. All it's saying is that you can do whatever you want with your land, as long as you can afford to.
It forces landowners to account for the opportunity costs they impose on society by not utilizing the land optimally, even if (and especially if) those costs change over time.
If you want a deep deep dive into how parking has shaped our cities - I would recommend reading about the “high cost of free parking” and “parking minimums”.
Europe resolves the fire issue in other ways. Regulations that limit the number of units per floor (4 for Germany, 8 for Austria), regulations for maximum distance to stairwell, and often building height.
The building height one is significant as the balcony is often the second means of egress, via a fire truck ladder.
I don’t think the goal is to increase the apartment capacity of existing multi-stair buildings.
Allowing single stair buildings facilitates multi family dwellings to be built on much smaller lots - even those that currently contain single family homes.
Changing that regulation is the basis for why cities like Paris can’t maintain New York level postulation density without many buildings greater than 6 floors.
I’ve lived and worked in very earthquake prone cities (Wellington, NZ). One of the reasons given to stay inside is that in certain areas of the city, shattered glass falling from sky scrapers would fill the street up to a meter deep along Lambton Quay.
In the article, the architect spoke about how the goal of single stair buildings is to kill that hallway - one stairwell with the doors to each apartment on the stair itself, then narrower lots; similar to how it’s done in Europe.
He points out that the long corridor type of building you are describing is often caused by the need to make a Teo staircase build financially viable.
I don't think the NZ bill of rights is applied the same way as other countries.
> Section 4 specifically denies the Act any supremacy over other legislation. The section states that Courts looking at cases under the Act cannot implicitly repeal or revoke, or make invalid or ineffective, or decline to apply any provision of any statute made by parliament, whether before or after the Act was passed because it is inconsistent with any provision of this Bill of Rights.
All that is true, but - we also don’t force farmers to internalize the externalities created by their industry.
Southland farmers themselves are saying that if they had to comply with proposed water and soil quality regulations that they wouldn’t be able to exist due to the increased costs involved.
The backlash even from the introduction of a heavy vehicles tax are representative of how much these farmers think they rely on the unpriced benefits they are getting.
First it's bridges, then it's roading, electric lines, gas lines, water lines, sewerage, civic buildings needing maintenance (schools, hospitals, community centers).
There are endless projects that need money to maintain and the current system of sprawl spreads that money too thinly.
That's not how that works. Infrastructure is built with many years of a cities budget; they are maintained with the current years (and sometimes, the next 5 years) budget.