I've been to a lot of fires with a couple of fatalities, but never on this scale. We made rescues off all four faces of this building. And there were people who had jumped even prior to our arrival, so we had to help them, broken limbs and whatnot. On the Milwaukee Fire Department, fire activity is climbing faster than emergency runs. I can point to a wide range of causes. We are hypothesizing it is a building stock that does nothing but get older year over year. In the U.S., housing has really never been more expensive. And that's because there isn't enough of it. Thankfully, the fire department got here quick because this thing was taking off. A fire could be going on on the 12th floor right now. We might not even know it. Hopefully, we are never bothered. Welcome to After the Fact. For the Pew Charitable Trusts, I'm Juliana Pence. We've talked a lot on this podcast about how housing is becoming more unaffordable for homebuyers. But the story is similar for renters, too. Today, half of all renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing. As state and local governments search for solutions, many are taking a second look at zoning laws that restrict what can be built and where. And as cities update their regulations, they're finding success. In Austin, for example, inflation-adjusted rents are down 25% in three years after simplifying housing code. But these solutions don't come without their challenges. Those who oppose changing zoning laws worry that building new, high-density apartments is actually a fire safety risk. But our guests today are here to explain how there might be more to that story. You just heard the voice of Chief Aaron Lipsky of the Milwaukee Fire Department at the very beginning of this episode. He was talking about a five-alarm fire that happened on May 11th of last year. Carol Kaufman, an after-the-fact correspondent and a staff writer here at Pew, was recently on the ground following him and other fire professionals to learn more. Carol, welcome. Thanks for having me. Can you share with us what you learned while out in the field? It was eye-opening hearing the firefighters' concerns, particularly about older buildings. And I learned the lack of housing options isn't just an economic issue. it's a life safety issue too. So there's a lot more to fire safety than keeping your smoke detectors up to date. Oh, absolutely. The things that we bring into our homes, TVs, clothes, plastic toys, all of that is really combustible. And they all can cause a room to, as Chief Lipski would tell us, flash over very quickly. For example, those lithium batteries that are in our scooters, our smartphones, e-bikes, if they're on fire, they're really difficult to put out. And where do we have all those lithium batteries? They're by our front doors. They're in an underground garage. All those access points that need to be clear to get out of a burning house. So it sounds like anyone who's apartment shopping or looking to buy a new home, that's really something to consider, yet not really something that people think about. That's right. Safety factors depend on the building's age and all of its safety features. The modern building, I think if we're looking at fire death and fire injury, amazingly safer. And I learned from Chief Lipski that having sprinklers makes a big difference. I don't care if we're talking about a residence, a workplace, an auto shop. If we're going to expect people to go into that building, we should have sprinklers in the building. That's my position. Well, that's pretty clear. I also sat down with Alex Horowitz, program director for Pew's Housing Policy Initiative. His team's research doesn't focus on individual fire systems like sprinklers. but they do look at how the age and types of homes impact safety. And their findings not only show newer homes provide better fire safety, building more housing lowers the cost for everybody. Alex, I've learned we're short about 4 to 7 million homes in the U.S. Can you tell us what housing looks like for Americans right now? Housing works like an escalator. When there are enough homes available, that escalator moves up and people trade up into better options. When there isn't enough housing getting built, the escalator moves down. Because when upper-income people can't find a home in an upper-income neighborhood, they tend to push into middle-income neighborhood to find something they can afford. Middle-income people do the same. Lower-income residents have nowhere to go. Historically, it's been about three years of income is equivalent to the median price for a home, but now we're closer to five years of income. That's putting homeownership out of reach for more and more families each year. One of the factors holding back the building of more housing is about the difficulty of going through the process to get housing permitted and that there a perception that new apartments especially are dangerous And we heard that from some building code officials and from some fire officials, but we couldn't find evidence. And so that led us to dig into this topic and try and figure out if there was some kind of danger because of actual bad outcomes. With all the fire safety features that are required in some places. Builders are ready to build homes if they're allowed to do so. I'll take you on a quick walk around. Wow, look at that view. Carol, while you were on the ground in Milwaukee, you got to tour a new apartment building. You'll see the sprinklers. We met up with Sheldon Opperman of New Land Enterprises. Sheldon and his team build residential buildings and high-rises in Milwaukee. They just finished the 25-story apartment building in 2022 called The Ascent. If you don't live in Milwaukee, I'd love to bring somebody up here and just go like, wow. Look at the lake. It had all the bells and whistles. It had an indoor pool. It had an amazing view of Lake Michigan, an outdoor movie theater. But Sheldon was also excited to show us all the latest fire safety features. This building has sprinkler systems, fire rating, fire alarms, smoke detection. This is just a big engine. That's the generator. This whole thing here. This whole thing here. Which would run the sprinklers. This keeps the smoke detection system and the fire alarm system running. It was impressive to learn about the scale of the features and the lengths builders will go to in many jurisdictions. So we asked him if prospective tenants ever asked to see the fire safety systems. And what did he say? No. No one ever asks. You can't continue to be in business without checking the boxes. The biggest thing I learned? You are much safer in the penthouse of a 25-story modern apartment building than you are in any typical single-family home. It's a one-in-a-million lightning strike. Right in the right spot, it hits the gas meter. Creates a blowtorch effect of fire up the side of the building. So I know you were able to talk to some other fire professionals. We had the chance to meet Eric Roden, battalion chief for the village of Caledonia, which is just outside of Milwaukee. He explained how the safety features really matter. The night before our visit, a fire happened to devastate a nearby townhouse, and he took us there. What was that like? A bolt of lightning had hit the gas meter and the parts of the townhouse that went up in flames. I mean, in the bedrooms, you could see the sky because the roof had opened up. The insulation was blown to pieces and raining down all over the bedroom. For this to be charred at the soft event that much, I mean, this fire took off right away. I've been involved in fire behavioral research. I've been an editor-in-chief of a firefighting trade magazine, and I get around the country a lot. I talk to firefighters about fire safety. Eric has been a firefighter for over 30 years and has seen the impact of different building codes. A lot of the codes take a while to catch up, but the preponderance of deaths that I've seen occur usually in single-family homes that are unprotected, had the minimal fire safety features. The disparity speaks volumes. volumes. Well obviously in this country there's a housing shortage. I mean you see it on the news, you see it on social media, and with multifamily developments you allow more units per block per neighborhood and there's an added layer of fire safety in these buildings that you don't have in single-family homes. The safety of buildings now is parallels our advancements in technology and virtually every industry. A car in the 1970s maybe had seat belts, no airbags, but Now you have a car that's half the weight that has airbags, unibody construction. The same holds true with housing. As the codes progressed, we learned not to repeat the history of our tragic fires. You would think in a multifamily apartment complex with a whole lot of families and a whole lot of kitchens and electrical appliances and whatnot, it would be higher. But that's not what you discovered. New apartments are dramatically safer than single-family homes. The apartment buildings have so many new safety features. Even just isolating homes built since 2000, the fire death rate in apartments is only one quarter the fire death rate in single homes built since 2000 The age of a building is by far the strongest predictor of its fire death rate So homes built before 1970 have a much higher fire death rate than, say, homes built since 2010, and that relationship is strongest for multifamily housing. My great-grandfathers began in the Milwaukee Fire Department, and then my grandfather and my father, my older brother and I came on together in the same fire academy class. Chief Lipski joked that firefighting, kind of a family business. In the contemporary Milwaukee Fire Department, we're facing increasing demand. We do know that fire is being used more as a weapon. Don't even get me started on lithium-ion batteries. It seems like the nature of firefighting today has changed. Yes. Chief Lipski took us around to see how older houses and the lack of reinvestment in some neighborhoods really does play a role in what the firefighters are dealing with. Does anybody get motion sick here? I just told the battalion door, did you copy? The battalion floor, everybody can pick up. Alright, it's nothing. This is probably just an automatic alarm, but we're very close. False alarm. Two-story apartment building up and took the investigators. This one's a good distance from where we are. All right, Rescue 2's inside. They found something on the first one. Occupants observed smoke. You could see a haze. The dispatcher sent what we call a smoke assignment. It's different than a first alarm. Pulling up on it here. What do you have, Benny? Got a whole crew here. Hey, see? Yeah, we do. They came to see you. Perfect. It's out. It was just a little rubbish on the stairwell. OK. And the carpet was burning a little bit, so we're just going to pull a bunch of that stuff off, wet it down. Sprinklers? I didn't notice any sprinklers. All right, so no sprinklers. So had this thing gotten advanced, it would have the run of the mill. The lieutenant on Rescue Company 2, this had four substantial fires in that building. In a multifamily dwelling, the risk profile is so much higher because there's just so many more people who are exposed to whatever's going on in any given apartment. All right, back in the saddle. Now we'll go up and look at Highland. I've been to a lot of fires with a lot of rescues and a lot of individual or maybe multiples, a couple of fatalities, but never on this scale. On Mother's Day this year, Sunday morning, in the 2700 block of West Highland, reports of smoke in the building began the fire department rolling over there, quickly followed by additional calls to 911, which upgraded the response before we even made it on scene. It was as textbook a response as you can imagine. And we pulled up, we had people out of third and fourth floor windows on all four sides, heavy smoke pushing behind many of them. You would have no understanding of how fast it 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. So I pulled up from this direction. We already had aerial ladders up. There was hose lines going in here. And one of the things that struck me when I passed by this alley and I looked, ended up being four people back here that were having CPR performed on them at once. Additional people were being carried out of the doorways and down ladders from the third and the fourth floor here. And this building is an enormous building. I want to say it's 96,000 square feet. So because it was pre-1974, what does that mean? It means no sprinklers were required when this building was built. Here in the state of Wisconsin, for buildings built pre-1974, we cannot retro compel anybody to upgrade fire suppression systems, basic building features that would slow the spread of fire And I'll point out that, generally speaking, low-income housing or middle-income housing will be found in the lower pre-1974 building stock. And so we'll have this enormous, vacant albatross of a building here. And five lives lost, five lives lost, when what we could be talking about here is something that took 10 or 15 minutes for us to zip in, clean it up, make sure nobody was hurt or sick. Instead, we've got five fatalities. There's no need for it. There is talk right now legislatively about compelling building owners at the time of renting communicating to a potential occupant, just so you are aware you're in a building that has no sprinkler systems, so that they're aware of what they're paying for. We talk with landlord groups about fire safety measures, prevention measures, but we have to get in front of community groups and say, if you have the means, absolutely make sure you're going to stay in a building that has sprinklers. This apartment is loaded with virtually everything you need. Eric showed off his new apartment, which was built in 2023. I was looking to downsize into a smaller apartment, and I wanted a new building. I walked in, I looked up, and there's a sprinkler over the inch of this place. So you have how many sprinklers? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight sprinklers. Eight sprinkler heads, yep. For a thousand? Yeah. Yeah, you're a thousand. We tell developers, you want to make a firefighter want to rent the top floor apartment in your building. So I'm sitting here on the top floor of this brand new apartment building. Eric advises builders on the process permitting and implementation of fire suppression systems for new structures. My crusade is to help fire departments and municipalities and developers understand that working together will create the safest buildings possible and realize the dreams of our skylines. Clearly, legacy zoning rules are still impacting us today, but what are the trends shaping the future? Alex and I did talk about the bright spots happening now, and there are many. But it's also important to understand how and why these zoning laws were set up in the first place. Why did so many municipalities zone land only for single-family homes? Is there a historical reason for that? In the 1920s, the average household size in the U.S. was over four, and now it's two and a half. So household sizes really were a lot bigger then. But also, this was a way to separate building types. So more affluent people tended to live in areas zoned single-family only, and people who couldn't afford large lots couldn't live in those neighborhoods and have access to those schools and the amenities nearby, and instead lived in areas that were zoned for commercial activity and apartments, which were separate. So what is being done now amongst municipalities and states and communities to rezone? Is there an effort underway to get more housing in these areas? So we're absolutely seeing state policymakers get involved. And so if you go back in time, from 2011 to 2016, all states combined in the U.S. passed an average of one law a year to allow more homes. In 2025, that figure was more than 100. Housing affordability is a problem that spills beyond the borders of any one jurisdiction. Increasingly, we're seeing states pick up these reforms that cities first pioneered. Minneapolis is one. They reduced their parking mandates. then they began allowing apartments on commercial corridors and near transit stops, they're currently wrapping up their ninth year with stable rents. Austin, Texas has had the same experience. Rents have actually been dropping in Austin since the middle of 2022. That's a real improvement in affordability. Raleigh, North Carolina has had a similar experience. New Rochelle, New York has had a similar experience. When there are enough homes allowed for everyone, affordability improves. I love hearing about the places that are taking steps to address housing affordability. One thing that stuck with me is that if people are struggling to afford a place to live, issues like fire safety aren't even on their radar. That's exactly right. And when local policies allow for enough housing, affordability improves. And as I learned from fire officials on the ground, it also creates more space to get safety right. Carol, thank you so much for being here today. I've learned a lot. Happy to be here. Happy to tell the story. Thanks for having me. And thanks for listening. Make sure you're subscribed to After the Fact wherever you get your podcasts to hear all of our latest episodes. For the Pew Charitable Trusts, I'm Juliana Pence, and this is After the Fact. Thank you.
