adobe photoshop - How would I recreate this effect of text that seems to flow over a flight of stairs?

Is there nondestructive way of achieving the wavy type effect, found below?

Answer

In Illustrator, you can use a Mesh Envelope distort to non-destructively warp text like this:

Select your text object, then use Object > Envelope Distort > Make With Mesh... and add however many rows and columns you need to get the desired effect. I used 16 rows and 1 column in my example.