At a time when the nation is facing a severe housing shortage, more multistory apartment buildings would offer more homes to more people. And there’s a big added benefit: Residents would be much safer from fires.
A new study by The Pew Charitable Trusts found that people living in big, tall, multistoried buildings—or any modern, multifamily complex—are much safer from fire than those living in a single-family house.
Pew tracked all publicly reported residential fire deaths in the United States in 2023 (when the most extensive data was available) and found that modern multifamily housing is six times safer than the rest of available housing, either multifamily housing built before 2000 or single-family housing.
“New apartments are the safest type of housing there is in the U.S.,” says Alex Horowitz, project director of Pew’s housing policy initiative. “In fact, if we look at the newest apartments built since 2010, they’re 17 or 18 times safer than pre-1970 homes.”
Data shows that multifamily housing in the U.S. has been getting safer over time. Since 1980, fire safety researchers have documented a downward trend in injuries and deaths in apartment building fires. In that year, the rate of deaths was 7.1 per 1,000 reported fires. In 2023, the rate was 5.2 deaths per 1,000 reported fires. Pew also found that the results were similar across multiple states, indicating a consistent trend. But what is truly striking is that just looking at housing built since 2000, the deaths from fires in apartment buildings was one-fourth the death rate in modern single-family homes.
It would seem that multifamily dwellings bring more risk. After all, they have separate kitchens for every unit, more heating and electrical equipment posing hazards, and all those residents using hazardous materials—from cigarettes and candles to lithium-ion battery-powered vehicles. And close proximity could cause the fires to spread from one unit to another. Combined, these perceptions often turn policymakers away from making zoning laws friendly for multifamily construction.
But they shouldn’t.
These buildings constructed since 2000 have far better fire safety records, in part, because of the way they are constructed. They’re made with layers of built-in safety measures, many that go largely unnoticed by policymakers—and those who live in them.
“This standpipe? This is the Cadillac of pipes,” says Village of Caledonia, Wisconsin, Fire Department Battalion Chief Erich Roden as he points to an innocuous-looking red pipe rising vertically in the stairwell of his own apartment building, located about 30 minutes south of Milwaukee. Looking closer, he gives it an upgrade: “I’d say it’s a Ferrari.”
The water pipe is 6 inches in diameter, larger than the required 4-inch diameter in modern apartment buildings in his community. A thousand gallons of water a minute will rush through the 6-inch pipe and into the firefighters’ hose should a fire erupt. And that’s just one feature most people wouldn’t notice. But Roden knows what makes homes safer from his 32 years of experience fighting fires, and that, in part, is why he chose to live where he does.
Continuing his safety tour, Roden points out all of the smoke detectors and sprinklers lining the hall ceilings outside of his third-floor 1,000 square foot, one-bedroom unit. Inside, silver circles dot his ceilings. “Eight sprinkler heads. That’s perfect,” he says, looking up. In case of a fire, “everything will get wet, but at least it will keep the fire in check.”
Roden says the true measure of safety is whether a firefighter will live on the top floor of a building, which he does. “I’m very confident in feeling safe, even while I’m sleeping."
To help others feel safe, Roden consults with engineers and builders during the construction process of multifamily buildings. It’s what he calls his “micro crusade” to assist fire departments, municipalities, developers, architects, and building engineers in creating the safest buildings possible while helping them to realize “the dreams of our skylines,” he says.
He worked with developers of the Ascent MKE, a 25-story apartment building—that also happens to be the world’s tallest mass-timber structure—finished in 2022 in downtown Milwaukee. Aside from its standpipes, sprinklers, and fire detectors, the building’s multiple, largely unseen features illustrate why a modern high-rise building is safer from fire than a single-family home. Seeing all of the features takes a few hours.
First on the list is the material used to build it.
Turns out, mass timber—assembled pieces of lumber that are glued together, akin to plywood, that’s used for beams, panels, and columns—takes a while to burn, says Sheldon Oppermann, chief financial officer and general counsel at New Land Enterprises, the developer of the Ascent. “The Ascent needs a three-hour fire rating, so the building has to survive three hours, long enough to get everybody out of the building or the firefighters up into the building,” Oppermann says. “You create the same three-hour fire rating as you would by wrapping steel with drywall.” But mass timber is much easier to transport, faster to build, and eco-friendly.
In modern apartment buildings, noncombustible stairs are built according to a specific size and equipped with doors that automatically close, which keep fires and smoke at bay and provide safe exits. Multiple fire alarms, water pumps, and smoke detectors all have built-in redundancies to ensure that they all have power in case of an electrical outage. In emergencies, the elevator system and fire alarms communicate outside the building, warning the fire department and relaying to firefighters what to expect on arrival. Exit lights guide residents outside in case of smoke. All of the systems are managed by professionals who ensure timely inspections, tests, and renewals when needed, says Oppermann. “Your home is protected even when you are not here,” he says. If a fire erupted “there’s sprinklers designed to put it out.”
And there’s another key factor in multifamily buildings.
“People,” says Oppermann. “There’s always a body here whose job it is to keep an eye on the camera system security. If any alarm goes off, there’s someone on site who’s been trained and knows what to do.” Even small buildings have a superintendent, he says.
Neighbors, too, are a second set of eyes and ears, who see or hear a fire or alarm and alert those who haven’t, says Oppermann. “Just living around other people makes you safer.”
Residents of single-family homes don’t enjoy most, if any, of these features. “The single-family home has inherent hazards, particularly the open interior stairs and a limited secondary means of egress,” says Rodin.
“You would have no understanding of how fast [a fire] happens and how fast it grows out of control and how fast a home you’ve lived in for years can seem like a maze,” says Aaron Lipski, Milwaukee’s fire chief, and a fourth-generation firefighter.
Lipski remembers such fires all too well. A 20-minute drive from the Ascent is the site of the city’s worst one—and a prime example.
On Mother’s Day in May 2025, at around 5:00 a.m., reports of smoke in the area began rolling in, followed by additional 911 calls. He recalls pulling up to the four-story, 85-unit apartment building to find people hanging out of the third- and fourth-floor windows on all sides with heavy smoke pushing out behind many of them. Others were laid out on the bricks below, receiving CPR.
“People had already jumped, so we had to help them with broken limbs,” he says. That day, the Milwaukee crews rescued many dozens of residents, either by carrying them down ladders or dragging them through hallways and down stairwells. But despite the efforts of all the available fire crews in the city, five people died.
Because it was constructed prior to 1974, before newer building codes came into effect, the building was not required to have many of the safety features that modern buildings like the Ascent have. But Lipski said that just one of the features would have changed everything.
“There was no sprinkler system, and so that fire traveled extremely rapidly, completely unchecked,” he says. “Smoke moved at a dizzying pace, over long distances,” which can make getting out of a building near impossible.
Both Lipski and Roden know what a difference a sprinkler system makes.
“When we pull up and can hear the gush of water from a sprinkler head, we know [the fire] is under control,” says Roden. “You still have smoke, but [sprinklers] do control the fire. Once you put the fire out, everything improves at a fire scene. It’s that simple.”
Older buildings were constructed before sprinklers were mandated. Building codes are set by states and local municipalities and vary throughout the U.S. But they only apply to new housing, and with the low rate of homebuilding in recent years, only a small share of housing is new. Horowitz notes that even though modern multifamily housing is the safest type, it only comprises 7% of homes.
Safety measures also add to the bottom line. But Lipski has seen too many fires and doesn’t buy the argument that these features are too expensive to install. “Fire suppression is always held up as the competition for all the other building improvements,” says Lipski. “Why is fire suppression always the thing that is thrown up there as a massive problem? Why isn’t it granite countertops, central air, the upgraded larger hot water heaters?”
The Pew report on fire safety comes as the nation is looking for solutions to a critical housing shortage. The U.S. also lacks enough housing to meet demand. Currently, the country is short at least 4 million to 7 million homes, be it single-family dwellings or spaces in multifamily buildings.
“Each year we’re building less housing than we need because there are so many regulatory barriers in the way of new homes, especially starter homes such as townhouses, duplexes, condos, and apartments where people can live close to the places they go every day,” says Pew’s Horowitz. “As a result, our housing stock is the oldest it’s ever been—and older housing is less safe than newer housing.”
More—and newer—living options would not only increase the housing stock, but would also keep people safer, says Horowitz, because the newer buildings with required safety features would lower the danger of fire.
But most land in cities and towns is only zoned for single-family homes or commercial use. “If a five-story office building is allowed, then a five-story apartment building should be allowed too,” says Horowitz. “Allowing apartments without a special-use permit, without a variance, without a rezoning, that’s near jobs, transit, stores, and restaurants is the right move.” Pew’s housing policy initiative is working with state and local policymakers to rethink how strict land-use regulations and statutes drive the housing shortage by limiting lower-cost housing options, such as apartments and townhouses.
Years ago, few states tackled this issue, and from 2011 to 2016, all states combined averaged passing only one law per year to allow more homes, such as by allowing apartments on all commercial streets. But in 2025, Texas, Washington, Montana, New Hampshire, Maine, California, and more than 20 other states set a national record, passing more than 100 different laws to allow more homes, ranging from requiring streamlined permitting to allowing basement or backyard accessory dwelling units. The cities of Austin, Minneapolis, and Raleigh, North Carolina, are among those that have simplified their zoning to make it easier to build homes—and have kept rents down in the process.
“All this is good news for housing affordability,” says Horowitz. “But it turns out, it’s also good news for fire safety too.”
Carol Kaufmann is a Trust staff writer.
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