A new approach for designing bilayer and multi-layer LDPC codes is proposed and studied in the asymptotic regime. The ensembles are defined through individual uni-variate degree distributions, one for each layer. We present a construction that: 1) enables low-complexity decoding for high-SNR channel instances, 2) provably approaches capacity for low-SNR instances, 3) scales linearly (in terms of design complexity) in the number of layers. For the setup where decoding the second layer is significantly more costly than the first layer, we propose an optimal-cost decoding schedule and study the trade-off between code rate and decoding cost.