Episode 103: Fire Safety in Multifamily Housing with Alex Horowitz (Incentives Series pt. 6)

Shane Phillips 0:00
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This is episode six in our ongoing incentive series supported by UCLA's Center for Incentive Design. Throughout this series, we'll be exploring the misalignment between what we say we want our policies and processes to achieve, the behaviors and outcomes they actually incentivize, and potential solutions. This is probably obvious, but if you've noticed that my voice is quite a bit off, it is because I am getting over a cold and my voice is not quite back to normal, but the interview itself was recorded before I came down with this cold, so you will not need to hear much more of me with this voice. This week, Alex Horowitz of Pew Charitable Trusts joins us to talk about the important and very policy relevant research he and his team have been doing on multifamily building safety, comparing old to new, multifamily to single-family, and single-stair to double-stair. If you're a regular housing voice listener, then you may not find it hard to believe what they found in their research. That when it comes to fire-related fatalities, multifamily buildings are safer than single-family, newer buildings are much safer than older ones, especially for multifamily, and buildings between four and six stories tall that have a single stairwell are just as safe as buildings with two sets of stairs. But as Alex shares in our conversation, these facts do not appear to be common knowledge among building officials and fire marshals, who often have mistaken or at best outdated beliefs about the dangers of living in multifamily housing. Those mistaken beliefs are important because they help motivate building and fire officials to push for ever stricter building codes, often at considerable cost and with little to no evidence that they'll actually make us safer. Alex and his team's work is helping advocates and public officials across the country make the case for a more holistic approach to safety, and they're showing us that there are some policies like single-stair reform that are win-win, simultaneously improving affordability and livability, and making us safer. This is the last episode on building codes for the incentive series. We're planning one more new episode before the end of the year, and we'll be back in 2026 with some fresh interviews and our book club for Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum. The first book club episode will cover chapters one through four, so feel free to start reading now and send your questions and comments my way. The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt, and Tiffany Lieu. You can reach me at shanephilips[at]ucla[dot]edu or on Bluesky and LinkedIn. With that, let's get to our conversation with Alex Horowitz. Alex Horowitz is project director for the housing policy initiative at Pew Charitable Trusts, guiding research on how home financing, the housing shortage, and land use regulations affect household wellbeing. He's with me today to talk about Pew's recent research on the safety record of multifamily housing generally and single-stair buildings in particular. Alex, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Alex Horowitz 3:32
Thanks, Shane. Great to be here.

Shane Phillips 3:34
And I have no co-host today, just me, so we're just going to move right forward. Alex, let's start with our tour. I think you're familiar with what we do here, so where are you taking us?

Alex Horowitz 3:46
We're going to start in Washington, DC, because that is where I've lived for 20 years and change. And the northwest part of DC is the best-known part of the city. It's got Dupont Circle, Georgetown, Adams Morgan. It's got the White House. So I'm going to stay on the slightly less known east side of town. So let's start in zip code 2-0-0-0-2 in Northeast DC, which is the zip code in the US that was adding the most apartments for a number of years recently. And that's because there were just so many lots that did not have much on them. And DC has been adding a lot of eight, 10, 12-story apartment buildings on those previously vacant lots in that zip code in Northeast DC. That is where Union Market is as well, which is a large food market that has had a lot of development around it, including apartment buildings. Obviously none's taller than 130 feet, because in DC we're not allowed to have buildings taller than 130 feet. There is a congressionally mandated height limit. And then we'll continue on in Northeast DC to see Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, which is a large outdoor space that is what it sounds like and has ponds and wildlife and plants. And continue on with some outdoor space to the National Arboretum that is just a big open space with lots of trees and flowers and plants and great area to walk around. Continue on to Kingman Island in Northeast DC, an outdoor space across the Anacostia River, just a little bit north of the RFK Stadium site, where we used to have football and DC may have football again, surrounded by acres of parking lots. Sounds familiar. In the near future, and then continue on down to Congressional Cemetery, which I find is not widely known among people outside DC, but ends up functioning as a giant dog park because it is a huge enclosed area that is an active cemetery and does have some famous people buried there. Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, former DC Mayor Marion Barry, Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, the bandleader John Philip Sousa, but is mostly used by DC residents as an enormous dog park, since it is many acres of enclosed land and dogs run free there while people visit.

Shane Phillips 6:16
That's great. My wife and I, we just got married a couple weeks ago, as you learned when we met a few days ago. But we've learned that one of our favorite things to do, which sounds a little creepy, but is when we're traveling to visit cemeteries. A lot of them are some of the best, most interesting open space and green space in a city. We love the one in Paris in particular, in the kind of eastern part of the city. So we met in DC when I visited, I think in 2023, and you mentioned the Union Market. Was that where we were at or were we in that general area?

Alex Horowitz 6:54
That's right. Yeah, we were right by Union Market in Northeast DC. There were a lot of apartment buildings that were under construction, not quite as many now. That interest rates have been high for a little while. But that area had very little residential before and now it has thousands of apartments that have gone up in that neighborhood.

Shane Phillips 7:11
Yeah, yeah. I was just there in June to speak at an event just for a couple days and we rode bikes around that area and it was, even in that short time, felt very different. They clearly added a bunch more and more was still under construction. So this is episode six of our incentive series and I'm excited for this one for a few reasons. One is that, as I mentioned, I got to meet Alex on a trip to DC in 2023 when he reached out and I just saw him again, literally only a few days ago and completely unexpectedly at a conference in Dallas. So now we get to keep nerding out on the podcast for everyone else to hear. The other reason I'm excited for this is that throughout this first section of the incentive series we've been dancing around the subject of safety, but not always addressing it directly head on. That's partly because it's Alex and his colleagues at Pew that really have the definitive work on this and I didn't want to steal their thunder. We mentioned their research once or twice in previous episodes, but now we're really going to dig into it. As for what that research is, we're going to focus on two reports published this year by Pew. The first is titled, Small Single Stairway Apartment Buildings Have a Strong Safety Record, authored by Seva Rodnyansky, Alex, Liz Clifford, and Dennis Su, as well as Stephen Smith and Sandeep Trivedi from the Center for Building in North America. The second is titled, Modern Multifamily Buildings Provide the Most Fire Protection, authored by Liz, Sieva, and Alex. To quickly preview the findings, using the metric of building fire-related fatalities, you find that single stair buildings are just as safe as double stair buildings. That's point one. Point two is that you find new multifamily housing is safer than older multifamily buildings and older single family homes, and that new multifamily is safer even than new single family, which I think may surprise some people. We'll talk about those findings and the research behind them momentarily, but first, Alex, I was hoping you could just give a quick overview on what Pew Charitable Trusts does and how it came to concentrate on housing issues, among other things, in recent years. Speaking for myself, it is not an organization I was really familiar with before you guys started publishing under this housing initiative a few years ago.

Alex Horowitz 9:29
The Pew Charitable Trusts is a non-profit, non-partisan organization, and we do research and policy work in the public interest. The Pew Research Center is a part of the Pew Charitable Trusts, and we focus on issues where we think we can add value that are either not widely understood or where we think that there's a gap to fill in terms of research, in terms of policy work, and that often means we end up focusing on very particular issues for a fixed amount of time. There aren't many issues that Pew works on for decades, and so the housing shortage is an issue that I've been interested in for a while, and Pew started doing work on home financing issues in 2020, so the decline in small mortgages, the loans people use to try and buy homes that aren't mortgages, like rent-to-own agreements or contracts for deed, personal property loans for manufactured homes, and then we started doing work on the housing shortage in 2023, focusing on land use, although we've started expanding already to building codes, permitting, and related issues.

Shane Phillips 10:37
Yeah, and we're going to talk about these two safety-related reports, but you guys have definitely put out some other great stuff in recent years. Former guest Jake Wegmann, you worked on a report with him on Houston's small lot housing development, and it's a report I reference all the time, because the finding in there was just really stunning that the townhouse-style homes being built on these lots as small as 1,400 square feet are 40% cheaper than similar new homes built on traditional larger lots. We're talking, I think, it's like $545,000 for these detached houses, the larger lot homes, to $340,000 for the median or average for these small lot homes, and yeah, it's just that kind of very practical, very specific analysis that tends to be very useful for sharing with policymakers and that kind of thing, so I do think you guys have really added a lot of value. Onward to this research. Since the first report is about safety in single-stair buildings, I think I'll first just give a quick refresher on our conversation with Mike Eliasson in episode 97, because that's where this first came up. In that interview, we talked about how buildings over three stories have to include two stairwells in nearly every US city, while in most other wealthy countries, a single stair is allowed for buildings anywhere from six to 20-plus stories tall. Allowing one stairway rather than two in smaller footprint buildings, buildings that might only have three or four units per floor, can avoid the double-loaded corridor design that pushes developers toward providing mostly studio and one-bedroom units. Double-loaded corridors also lead to having windows on only a single wall for most units, and so we end up with fewer family-sized homes and less access to natural light and ventilation. We get units that are more exposed to street noise, et cetera. Requiring two stairwells and double-loaded corridors also reduces the leaseable or sellable space in a building, and you estimate that just switching to a single stair in smaller projects could reduce construction costs by six to 13%. Just to put that in perspective, if construction is, let's say, two-thirds of the price of building an apartment, and a new two-bedroom apartment typically costs $2,000 a month, then removing a stairwell could make it possible to lower rent by 80 to $170 a month, just removing one stairway. These benefits are most important for smaller projects and on smaller sites because that extra stairwell and corridor space take up a much larger share of a building on a 5,000 or 8,000-square-foot parcel than in a project that might be built on an acre or two. Yet it is important to take a step back and recognize that the second stairwell is first and foremost intended as a safety measure. If we can remove it and save money and improve design, then that would be great, but if those benefits come at the cost of significantly higher odds of dying in a fire or from smoke inhalation, then that's obviously a very steep price to pay. Fire officials tell us that that is the trade-off we're making if we are to get rid of this second stair, though to my knowledge they have not yet provided any empirical evidence for that claim. So you and your team decided to look into it yourself, and let's just start by having you explain how you did it. One obvious problem with studying the safety outcomes of 4- to 6-story single-stair buildings is that they are mostly illegal to build here in the US, so we don't have a lot of them. So tell us how you solved that and what you found.

Alex Horowitz 14:11
We saw that people who had written about single-stair before often highlighted that most countries allow this style of building, where an apartment building of 5-6 stories, but certainly in some countries 20 or 25 stories, can have one stairway, and that is allowed for apartment buildings, and that the fire death rates in those countries are largely lower than they are for the US. The US has a relatively high fire death rate for a rich country, while many countries that allow taller single-stair buildings just have fire death rates that are a fraction of ours. But we wanted to dig into the US context and understand whether we could learn anything domestically. And in the US, the only two large cities that have allowed single-stair buildings for at least a few decades are New York City and Seattle. So working with the Center for Building in North America, and Stephen Smith, who leads the Center for Building in North America, had developed this idea, we took all of the fire deaths in New York City that showed up in a publicly available database. And first, the National Fire Incident Reporting System, or USFA Media, the US Fire Administration's database of all fire deaths that they find that are reported in media. We took those two and we merged them, and then removed any fire fatalities which showed up in both. And that let us categorize nearly all of the fire deaths that would have happened in New York City during that time period, because those two databases combined have very good coverage, even though neither one of them on a standalone basis gives you comprehensive data. We also identified a few fire fatalities that didn't show up in either one of those databases, but combined they have very strong coverage. And then we looked at all of the fire deaths there to see if any of them took place in buildings that looked like they had a single stair. We did that by using Pluto, the New York City property tax record system, and overall we could identify 4,440 single-stair buildings that were four to six stories tall in New York City. And we also have a record of all of the other buildings in New York City because they show up in that property tax database. And so we could look at fatalities from fires in single-stair buildings and fatalities and fires in the rest of the housing stock in New York City.

Shane Phillips 16:43
And what did you find from that analysis? I think New York's data is really exceptional here. The fire death data is pretty universal across the country it sounds like, but very few places are you going to actually get data on which buildings have a single stairwell and which do not. But New York's just happens to be very good and it happens to be a very large city where you can get pretty good statistical power with your analysis. And it happens to be a city, one of the few, that has allowed four to six-story single-stair buildings for quite a while. And so you have a nice treatment group here. So what did you find in this analysis then?

Alex Horowitz 17:23
So we found that the fire fatality rate in single-stair buildings in New York City was the same as the fire fatality rate in all other housing in New York City. And that rate was five fire fatalities per million residents per year. And so we were able to do that by identifying the three fire fatalities that took place in single-stair buildings during that time period in New York City and the 465 fire deaths that took place in other housing during that time period in New York City.

Shane Phillips 17:53
Yeah, and I think at some level having the conversations we've already had in this series, maybe these findings aren't surprising. But I'm sure they are a bit surprising to some listeners and frankly to me too even. Even if the safety benefit is small, it just makes intuitive sense that an extra means of egress would make people safer. So we should talk about why that might not make such a difference to overall fire safety. This will get us into some territory also covered by your study comparing safety for single-family and multifamily housing, both newer and older. But I get the impression putting these two reports together that a lot of this improvement in safety comes down to the presence of sprinklers in modern U.S. multifamily buildings, whether they've got one stairwell or two. So what do you think is going on here?

Alex Horowitz 18:43
Sprinklers are almost certainly a piece of the puzzle. We know that sprinklers do improve fire safety and modern multifamily buildings have sprinklers and that's a lot of what's going on. But that's almost certainly not everything that's going on because building materials have gotten safer over time. And if we're talking about a stairway that is built today in a modern apartment building, it's built of non-combustible material. So the stairs themselves are probably made of concrete. The railings in the stairway are probably made of metal. The stairway itself is surrounded by fire-rated walls, so walls that would take fire a given amount of time to penetrate. The stairway is enclosed with fire-rated doors that are self-closing, meaning someone doesn't have to pull or push them shut, they're going to close on their own. And importantly, apartments today have self-closing doors. So if someone runs out of their apartment when it's on fire, the door closes behind them. They don't have to pull it shut. That's an important intervention. We know that there have been some fires in older apartment buildings that had a lot of fatalities where the resident of the unit that was on fire left the door open. And that's how it spread because people are rushing out in a hurry. So having self-closing doors can make a difference. Using smoke detectors we know makes a difference too, and in apartment buildings, the smoke detectors are connected.

Shane Phillips 20:11
The self-closing doors was kind of a revelation for me, again, just as someone who hasn't researched this myself and doesn't know much about this world. But I've been to plenty of apartments where you open the door and it closes behind you. And I always just found that kind of annoying when you're trying to keep it open as you pull your bike out or something like that. But I'm glad to hear there is a actually valuable safety reason for this. And I will thank myself closing door the next time I am annoyed by it. I wonder if we should maybe just give a little bit of the history here too. So you go through some of the history of where this requirement came from. What do you want to share there? It seems like this evolved from a fire escape requirement at one point.

Alex Horowitz 20:57
That's right. Buildings used to be more dangerous than they are today. And so there was a requirement for two exits from the building. And fire escapes were one way that were one possibility for egress. But fire escapes were fairly dangerous. People could slip off them. They can become icy in wintertime. There were some high-profile fire escape collapses where the fire escape itself fell off the building. People who have been killed or pedestrians on the sidewalk by pieces of a falling fire escape, not even during a fire, just because fire escapes are exposed to the elements. And so there was a requirement in many places for two exits from the building to essentially just give people two chances to get out because apartment buildings in fact were fairly dangerous a long time ago. And so having two chances to get out instead of one gave people a better shot at exiting a dangerous fire.

Shane Phillips 21:59
And I actually wanted to talk about the two fires you identified in single-stair buildings over three stories tall in New York City, because I think they're kind of illuminating. I was speaking with some people at the Dallas Housing Coalition Summit we were at a few days ago, and they were sort of incredulous when I told them about your findings. It just kind of came up in passing. They did believe me and they believed your study, but they were really genuinely surprised. The thing they were stuck on is, what if something happens to block the one stairwell that you've got? And that strikes me as an entirely reasonable question. It's something that came up for me. I didn't have a great answer for them, other than that it just doesn't seem to be a real world problem. Or at the very least, it seems rare enough that it had not come up once in 10 years in the biggest city in the United States. That got me to thinking that maybe the assumptions we have about fatal building fires and what causes them are just wrong or out of date. So could you tell us about those two fires and what you think they may say about how deadly fires really play out?

Alex Horowitz 23:01
So we found two fatal fires resulting in three fire fatalities in New York City during the period that we studied covering 11 years and change.

Shane Phillips 23:11
In these single stair buildings?

Alex Horowitz 23:12
In these single stair buildings.

Shane Phillips 23:14
Over three stories, yeah.

Alex Horowitz 23:16
In both cases, the fire occurred inside an apartment and the resident was not able to make it out of the apartment and the fire itself did not leave the apartment. In one case, it was actually a ground floor fire, so the resident wouldn't have needed to use any stairway, but the fire occurred in the apartment and stayed there, killing the resident. In another case, there was a single stair building that was only three units covering four stories and two illegal units had been added in the building that did not have smoke detectors. And one of the fires took place in an illegally subdivided unit, which had a lot of risk factors. Someone sleeping with a lit candle and a space heater plugged into an extension cord and of course no smoke detectors in that unit. And again, the fire itself did not leave the unit of origin, but the residents themselves weren't able to make it out. And so egress from the building just was not a factor at all. And in the Seattle fatal fire, in a single stair building that we identified, it was the same situation where the fire took place inside an apartment. The fire did not leave the apartment. The resident couldn't make it out either, but again, the lack of a second stairway just didn't play any role whatsoever in any of these fire deaths.

Shane Phillips 24:39
Do you have any thoughts on why these fires were contained to these individual apartments? Does this come down to maybe the less combustible material being used in these buildings? Or do you think there's some other explanation here? Or is it just kind of chance we're not talking about a lot of a lot of fire deaths to begin with?

Alex Horowitz 24:57
Well, in modern buildings, fires inside an apartment usually stay in that apartment. And that's because there's a fire separation between all the units, so that there is some fire-resistant material in the walls. They're fire-rated between the units. And then the doors themselves have some fire rating. And again, they're self-closing, so you've got a closed door with fire-safe material. And then there are smoke detectors that will go off and alert people, so that even if the resident is incapacitated, or if the resident were to die in a fire in the apartment, other residents are notified by smoke detectors and are aware of the fire.

Shane Phillips 25:39
Got it. So, you know, I feel like maybe the average person does not have a very good sense for how people are most likely to die in a building fire. But it seems like that may also be true of the people writing and influencing our codes. Obviously, firefighters have knowledge and experience that we do not and never will. And I don't want anything I say here to be misconstrued as denigrating the profession or the essential and genuinely heroic work that they do. But reading through this report and the justifications made for the two-stair requirement, you really get the sense that they have blind spots like anyone else. Two stairwells makes it possible for firefighters to designate one for evacuation and the other for what they call the attack stair, where they bring up the hose and whatever other equipment they may need. That's the theory anyway, but you note a few different reasons that this approach can be impractical and how it could even make occupants less safe than if they just had to negotiate evacuating a single stairway as firefighters worked their way up. Could you explain that for us?

Alex Horowitz 26:42
In a single stair building, there are several elements that add safety compared with a two-stair building. One is just that residents are closer to the stairway. In a single stair building, in the codes that have passed in the US, they require that each apartment door be within 20 feet of the stairway. A second is that single stair buildings are small. They're limited to no more than six stories and no more than four units per floor, typically. So that means the building itself is just small. It'll be quick to evacuate because it has fewer residents than a large two-stair building. The occupant load on the stairway is going to be lower. In a two-stair building where you have 200 or 300 units, you're talking about 100 to 150 units worth of people on each stairway. Here we're talking about no more than 24 units in the building, four of which would be on the ground floor. So no more than 20 units of people on the stairway. Most of all, modern single stair buildings are safer because they're modern multifamily. That's the safest housing type. By bringing more modern multifamily online, but also in these smaller buildings that are quick to evacuate where all the residents are near the stair, that's going to improve fire safety. We got interested in this issue, and the reason why I focused on it is because we work on the housing shortage. Here's a way to add housing that costs less to build and is closer to the places people go every day because it fits on small lots near transit, near stores, near schools. The fire safety issue is something that was holding it back, which is how we looked into it. But then we were able to see pretty clearly that allowing more modern family buildings, whether they're one-stair or two-stair, are going to improve fire safety.

Shane Phillips 28:26
Could you say a little bit about the regulations, the kind of practices in these larger buildings that as we talked about before, you might end up with 20, 30 units on a single floor or more. Part of what's driving that is this double stair requirement where you have to dedicate so much space to just these means of egress that building on a 6,000 square foot parcel just doesn't really make sense in most cases. So you end up with projects that are covering an acre or two acres or more. Tell us a little bit about what the potential safety consequences are of that and how our codes actually kind of make us less safe by pushing us into those kinds of buildings.

Alex Horowitz 29:09
Modern two-stair buildings, we know that they're also quite safe and that the fire safety record there is good as well. But in terms of something like smoke spread, those are going to be more vulnerable to smoke spread than a single stair building because they have long horizontal corridors, which is a major way that smoke spreads in a fire. But also the residents are just so much farther from the stair in a large two-stair building where apartments can be up to 250 feet from the stairway, where in a single stair building you wouldn't be more than 20 feet from the stairway.

Shane Phillips 29:43
Yeah, that's such a big difference.

Alex Horowitz 29:45
It's a dramatic difference. And hypothetically, if one of the stairs is being used for firefighters coming in to put out the fire or if one of the stairways were blocked or compromised in some way, well now somebody could be not just 250 feet from a stairway, but easily more than 500 feet from a stairway if it's the far one from their apartment that is being used for exit.

Shane Phillips 30:12
The National Association of State Fire Marshals wrote in 2024, and this is included in your report, they wrote that single stairway apartment buildings run, quote, contrary to decades of research and investigation validating the need for multiple exits, end quote. But you guys looked and couldn't find any such research. This report's something like nine months old at this point, so I was wondering if you'd heard from the fire marshals or from anyone else, and if any of these studies they refer to have surfaced for you.

Alex Horowitz 30:43
We haven't yet, and we've reached out to the fire service organizations, but I will say that individual state fire marshals and sometimes county or city fire chiefs have shown some openness to this. And so just in 2024, 2025, we've seen states passing bills to legalize single stair construction or pass bills to create a study group that looks at this issue, and fire marshals are included in those study groups, and we've seen states already take steps to allow these buildings. Texas and Montana allowing six-story single stair buildings, we've seen Virginia take steps to allow a four-story single stair building, New Hampshire to allow four-story Maine, take steps to allow four-story single stair buildings, Connecticut as well. So there's real movement here, and fire marshals are included in these conversations, so we are seeing some openness from individual fire marshals, individual fire chiefs, but we hope that the organizations remain open-minded and are interested in learning about the latest data because there's a real opportunity here for a win-win where we improve affordability and improve fire safety at the same time.

Shane Phillips 31:57
Yeah, yeah. It's good to hear that at least some individual jurisdiction officials, if not the national organization, are kind of coming around or at least open to this conversation. You also looked at Seattle, as we talked about, as one of the only other U.S. cities that's allowed single stair buildings up to six stories and has for decades, and you looked at the Netherlands as an international case. I think data limitations didn't really allow you to investigate this safety question with the same level of detail as in New York, but given the data available, you didn't find any evidence that single stair buildings were more dangerous in these places either. Is there anything else you want to say about either place and your research there?

Alex Horowitz 32:38
So the way that we looked at Seattle was because Seattle is not nearly as big as New York City and it also has a low fire death rate, then we were able to look at all of the fire deaths that took place in Seattle from the fall of 2012 to the fall of 2024 and just examined each of them to see if they could have been in a four to six story single stair building. There was only one and the fire itself took place and was confined to the unit of origin and that's where the fatality occurred, so the lack of a second stair didn't play any role in the fire death in that building, even though we couldn't create a rate with Seattle single stair buildings. In the Netherlands, we looked at research that actually had already been published in the Netherlands, but it was only in Dutch and happily, Stephen Smith can read some Dutch and-

Shane Phillips 33:26
That guy can read like six languages, I feel like.

Alex Horowitz 33:31
I think that's right, he has many skills. And then one of our Pew colleagues speaks Dutch and was able to read that in some detail and translate that for us, so we were able to bring in that research, which already existed, it just hadn't been translated to English. And we see that the fire death rate for single stair buildings in the Netherlands is no higher than for other housing types, it's about the same, but they did discover in the Netherlands that the rate of rescues in single stair buildings was a little higher than in other housing types, and this was back in 2010, so they recommended that those buildings have self-closers on the doors, because the Netherlands didn't have self-closers on apartment doors at that time, and that adding self-closers to the doors would sharply reduce the risk of fire injuries in those buildings and fire spread, and so they adopted that reform.

Shane Phillips 34:26
Oh, that's great to hear. And I think, if I'm recalling correctly, the fire death rate in the US is already like four to five times higher than in the Netherlands, and so clearly they're doing something right. Another thing I wanted to underline here, just going back to the question about what happens if a stairwell is blocked, again, Netherlands allows this, and you have a table in the report that shows a bunch of other countries and the maximum height that they'll allow, and there are many countries, you know, the Germany's and France's of the world, the Singapore's, et cetera, that allow 10 plus stories, 15 plus stories with a single stairwell, and so, again, just this intuitive concern about a stairwell being blocked and that becoming a real threat to life for people just does not seem to be a serious concern in practice for places that have much better safety outcomes than we do here in the United States. So that's probably enough about the single stair study. Just to summarize, in the US, the data on fire deaths in single stair buildings between four and six stories suggests that these buildings are no more dangerous than similar buildings with two stairwells, and high income countries across Europe and the rest of the world generally allow single stair buildings well above six stories with no obvious negative impact on safety. The costs of requiring two stairwells in these buildings are very well documented and indisputable, and there's no real evidence of improved safety, at least to date. So now let's talk about your report on how building safety has improved over time for housing of all types, not just single stair, but especially for multifamily relative to single family and just newer housing generally. I want to spend some time talking about how these reports tie together also, so I think we can just mostly hit the highlights on this one. So tell us what we should know from it.

Alex Horowitz 36:18
So using the same methodology that we used for the single stair report, we looked at all fire deaths in the US in 2023, because that was the most recent year for which we had complete data from the two large publicly available data sets, ANFERS and USFA media again. And so we looked at all of the fire deaths in the US, and then my colleague Liz Clifford and research assistants hand coded all of them to see whether they took place in a single family home, in a multifamily building, how many units were in the building, and what year the building was constructed. And then we separated those by state also.

Shane Phillips 36:59
We salute their service.

Alex Horowitz 37:00
Yes, thank you to Liz and the research assistants who worked on this. That was a lot of fire deaths to code, 2,377 to be precise.

Shane Phillips 37:09
Wow.

Alex Horowitz 37:10
And so the strongest finding in this is that the age of the building is the strongest determinant of the rate of fire death. And for multifamily buildings, the rate of fire death was lower, and the gap gets much bigger for new buildings. So the rate of fire death was the lowest for modern multifamily buildings. If we're looking at apartments built since 2000, the fire death rate was 1.2 per million, whereas for single family homes and for pre-2000 apartments, it was a little over seven and a half.

Shane Phillips 37:47
Yeah. And I found it interesting that the main findings of the report, the things you emphasize maybe for statistical power purposes, maybe just to simplify it, but you kind of compare pre-2000 to 2000 and later. But if you actually zoom in further and look at multifamily housing built in the 2000s compared to multifamily built in the 2010s, for multifamily housing built in the 2000s, the death rate is 1.8 per million life years, experience years in these units. And in the 2010s, that falls to 0.5. So even there, it's fallen by more than two thirds. You do a bunch of follow-up analysis to pretty convincingly rule out other explanations for improvement in fire safety and for the improvements in multifamily safety in particular. You find safety improvements in two to four unit multifamily buildings and buildings with five or more units. You show that the better performance for multifamily probably can't be explained by differences in resident age, which was a concern because older people have a greater risk of dying in fires. And so you thought maybe this could be caused by older people living disproportionately in single family houses. Wasn't that. You rule out household and resident income since lower incomes are associated with higher death rates. You note among other things that about a quarter of apartments built since 2000 were funded by the low income housing tax credit. So they exclusively house lower income residents. And you look at urban versus rural, nothing there. You look across states, I want to note that as well and find a pretty consistent, there's still more variation than the national figures, but it is consistent with your findings overall. One thing I don't think you talk about and that I only thought about days after reading the report while working on these questions is it's about how you see big improvements pretty much every decade, even going from housing built in the 2000s to housing from the 2010s. It made me wonder if part of what's going on is just that fire risk increases as buildings age. So it's not entirely about the ways the housing is built, but just over time buildings accumulate wear and tear. Some systems may not be well maintained. They might be subdivided or make unpermitted renovations, which is one of the deaths in New York City that you talked about. Maybe they end up more overcrowded as they filter down to people who couldn't afford the homes when they were new. I think of this as a complimentary explanation rather than an alternative one, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that and whether it's something you all considered while working on the report.

Alex Horowitz 40:23
I think that there's some truth to that and that buildings probably do become at least a little less safe as they age. But I think part of what's going on here also is that we've been building so little housing that our housing stock keeps getting older each year. The age of our housing stock is not a given. In 2023, the median age of tenant-occupied housing in the US is 43 years old. That's the oldest it's ever been. And it could be much younger if we were building a lot more housing, both so that older dilapidated housing were torn down or were replaced, or if there were just enough new housing coming online that people could trade up into better options. And that would enable our housing stock to be younger. So I think that there is some truth to that and that buildings probably do become less safe over time, but also this doesn't have to happen where housing stock is as old as it is if we were building more homes. But there's also clearly a pretty large effect from just the construction type. During the 2000s, we saw a lot of standards being introduced, including self-closing doors, including sprinklers being more widely adopted for multifamily buildings, and having enclosed non-combustible stairways as part of that. The introduction of 10-year batteries on smoke detectors may be helping also because those are relatively recent, that those have been widely adopted. So I think there's a lot going on here and it's going to be really tough to disaggregate, and there would be a lot of value in having more research in figuring out which interventions made a difference. The way that we dug in on single stair, so we know that the second stairway is not improving safety, at least for small apartment buildings, but overall we can't tease out the relative benefit of self-closing doors versus enclosed stairways, of non-combustible stairwells versus connected smoke detectors versus sprinklers, or even what type of sprinklers should be installed.

Shane Phillips 42:27
Yeah, yeah. That's a great point and a call to all the researchers out there listening. But yeah, I think this idea that an older and aging housing stock is just kind of what we're stuck with is not actually a given. And aside from improving and replacing lower quality stock, I think when you're building more housing, you tend to put more pressure on the landlords of that lower quality stock to kind of step up their game and improve their units so that they can compete. It's either that or go vacant or tear it down and build something new. So you kind of were just getting at this, but I suspect a good portion of our listeners are waiting for me to ask some version of this question. Isn't this evidence that stricter building codes are working? For all the skepticism that we've expressed about the US code regime in past episodes, it does seem to be delivering on its safety promises. The International Code Council formed in 1999 and the death rate in multifamily fell by more than half from homes built in the 1990s to the 2000s and it fell another 70% the next decade as we talked about. Single family safety also improved, but not to the same degree. And I think you could make the argument that gains have been slower there because single family homes use the less strict residential code while multifamily over two units uses the more demanding commercial code. So what do you say to someone who might be thinking that these findings actually just show that these requirements are all worth it?

Alex Horowitz 43:58
I think there's a strong case to make that more stringent building codes have in fact improved safety in housing and there's a real trade-off to think about here in terms of cost as well because we know that when housing costs more to build, less of it gets built and we know that newer housing is a lot safer than older housing. So it really depends on what the trade-off is here and which interventions are worth it. Based on the research from the Netherlands, there's evidence that self-closers on apartment doors are really helpful in limiting fire spread and that's also a really inexpensive intervention. So that kind of cost-benefit analysis is often missing from figuring out whether we should adopt a certain reform and what the overall impact will be on the housing supply. Looking back at Stephen Smith's research on elevators, our elevators have gotten much more expensive than other countries and so we get many fewer of them. So there is a real trade-off in cost and it's not just cost because newer housing is itself safer. So if we get less of it, that's not good for safety.

Shane Phillips 45:14
Yeah, 100% and that now again leads me to my next question which is about safety in a more holistic sense, both in terms of other causes of death and non-lethal injury. We talked in an earlier episode about how when we increase the cost of building multifamily housing in urban areas, more people end up living in the suburbs and exurbs probably in single-family homes where they drive a lot more. Maybe they even end up in multifamily projects but again out in the suburbs where there's just more space and two stairs is not really a burden to provide in the same way. So I wanted to talk about this comparison of driving safety versus fire safety with some actual numbers and by my estimate, someone who drives the US average of about 15,000 miles per year has about a 210 in 1 million chance of dying or killing someone in their car. The odds of dying in a fire in your New York study were about five in a million. So you're about 40 times more likely to die while driving. Even if stricter fire codes could entirely eliminate your chances of dying in a multifamily fire, if they meaningfully raise the cost of development and push more housing out of cities and into the suburbs, then we are making people less safe on the whole. If I'm able to drive 7,500 miles per year in the city and I now have to live further away and drive 15,000 miles a year twice as much, then it doesn't actually matter in a meaningful way that you've reduced my chances of dying in a fire from five out of a million to zero because you also just increased my chances of dying in a car from 105 to 210 in a million. The increase in my vehicle death risk increased 20 times more than the decrease in my risk of death by fire. I wanted to share that driving example because we've talked about it in some earlier episodes, but I know you have some other examples of how there are indirect costs to these requirements and to just building less multifamily housing overall. And I thought the homelessness one was especially poignant. So could you walk us through that?

Alex Horowitz 47:21
Sure. In our research, in other papers, we've seen the very strong connection between housing costs and homelessness. When there aren't enough homes and that drives up rents, then homelessness increases in tandem. In places where we've seen enough housing come online, where rents start to come down, we've seen drops in homelessness, but homelessness itself is deadly. People have shortened life expectancy when they don't have a home. Even in this report, we actually saw a lot more fire deaths in homelessness-related situations than we did in the newest apartments built since 2010. Those are fire deaths from homelessness, and that was dramatically higher than fire deaths in the newest apartments. Even from just a fire death perspective, the difficulty that we've created for building new apartments, and this is as much about land use and permitting as anything else, is having negative fire death consequences and also leading to more deaths from homelessness.

Shane Phillips 48:31
Yeah. I think that's an important point that this is not just about single-stair requirements or any building code thing in particular. At the end of the day, these things are all probably secondary to just the fact that we prohibit multifamily housing in most places, but that is increasingly being addressed and hence there's a lot more attention on the building code these days. But I don't even recall if you mentioned this in the report or not, but note that just looking at fire safety for people experiencing homelessness, you reach the same conclusion, putting aside the increase in risk from exposure and traffic violence and crime and all the other things that people experiencing homelessness are at risk of and why they have such a higher risk of death than the average person in a community. As we have gone through these many episodes on building codes and standards, I've been thinking a lot about how we balance safety with other priorities and the circumstances where we choose to impose costly safety mandates and the circumstances where we don't. I don't think it's a coincidence that we impose these costly standards on multifamily and the mostly renter households who live in it, but not on single-family housing and not on automakers, drivers, transportation departments in the case of mobility and cars. I had a lot of thoughts about this, but I thought at first maybe this is just like, well, we just don't care as much about tenants as we do about homeowners and drivers. But I think a lot of this comes down to political power and the National Association of Home Builders is sort of the representative of single-family builders and in an indirect way, also single-family home buyers. The multifamily industry does not have a lobbying group nearly as powerful. It's just a lot more of a distributed kind of market. And so I'm just curious to hear what you think is going on here, like why we find it so comfortable, so easy to raise these costs on multifamily housing, but not on single-family housing, not feel that same pressure to make driving a lot safer. Is this just about political power and money and politics and that kind of thing or is something else going on here?

Alex Horowitz 50:51
Well, I think that there's a genuine lack of information here. So sitting in a number of meetings with state policymakers, including building code officials and including fire marshals, I heard a lot of comments about apartment buildings being dangerous and the need for greater fire safety in apartments. And that's actually what inspired us to do this research in the first place, because once we had the methodology available from the single-stay work, even though we hadn't published it yet, we realized that we could figure this out for other types of fire death also. So Seva Rodnyansky and Liz Clifford and I were talking about this and trying to figure out how we would go about this and then realize we could just code every fire death in the US and sort it by building type and age. And the findings were really, really striking considering the feedback we had been getting and what we've been hearing from state policymakers, including building code officials and fire officials, where there was an expectation that apartments were more dangerous than single-family homes. But it really turned out that the opposite was true, and some of the justifications being put forward for putting stringent requirements on new apartments, including large off-street parking mandates and large setbacks, was the risk of fire in these buildings. And the data just couldn't be more clear that modern apartments are the safest housing type when it comes to fire, and there isn't a close second. But the answer here probably isn't to make single-family homes more expensive to build, because single-family homes built since 2010 have a fire death rate three times lower than single-family homes built before 1970. And more new single-family is part of the solution also, but there's just so many factors holding back apartment construction. And part of why we did this research is to try and figure out whether the fire safety concerns that were leading state officials to call for large parking mandates, to call for large setbacks, to call for additional bells and whistles, not just in the building code but as part of the site plan process, were in fact counterproductive, and they are.

Shane Phillips 53:10
Did you have any intuition or get a sense for why many of these officials feel that multifamily is less safe? If I had to guess, it might be in the same way as people, when surveyed, if you ask them about their neighborhood or about their schools, they usually give them pretty high marks. But if you ask them how schools in America are doing or how crime is in neighborhoods across the country, they'll say it's bad and getting worse, and there's just this disconnect. And of course, many firefighters, many upper-level code officials and so forth don't live in multifamily and probably haven't for a long time. And so they just, it's the other. That's kind of one guess here, but you were in more of these meetings directly. And so what was your sense?

Alex Horowitz 53:57
Well look, if your impressions were formed a long time ago, that may be a factor too. Because both single-family homes and apartments built before 1970 have a fire death rate that's more than seven times that of apartments built since 2000. So it's also possible that outdated impressions are some of what's driving this and that officials, including building code officials, don't realize how successful the new building codes have been and just how safe new apartment buildings are.

Shane Phillips 54:27
That's a great point, I think in particular, because we used to build a lot more multifamily pre, let's say 1970 or so. And so a very disproportionate share of the multifamily fires and other problems that firefighters and others are seeing are going to be in that older stock, but it's just going to be kind of overrepresented. And if that's all they're seeing, that's going to be, that is multifamily housing to them at some level. So I think we've just about covered it here. I loved these two reports. I had seen them earlier this year as they were coming out. I definitely skimmed them, shared them around the key takeaways. But getting to really dig in and read through these in detail, there's just so much great stuff in here that I think advocates and policymakers would benefit from taking a closer look at and not just these headline findings. But you and the folks at Pew have been really engaged with policymakers and advocates across the country in these meetings, as you said, with us meeting in Dallas being a case in point. So if you're with us out here, tell us about some of that work and how this research has influenced what you're recommending when you meet with city council members and state legislators and fire officials and so forth.

Alex Horowitz 55:37
Part of what motivated us to get into the space is that there's so much terrific research out there on housing and the housing shortage and housing affordability and how supply affects costs. And we had spent time working with state policymakers on other issues and thought that there was a chance to bring some of that research to them and also use real world examples a lot of the time. So we've relied heavily on real world examples of events that have already occurred. So spending time on the Houston minimum lot size reform that you mentioned at the outset that Jake Wegmann and co had dug into and looking at Minneapolis, which had a surge in apartment production after they reduced their parking mandates and then allowed apartments by right near commerce and near transit and looking at other cities that have had meaningful reforms and added housing and seen affordability improve like Austin, Texas or Raleigh, North Carolina and some of the small lot reforms and making it easier to build generally in places like Durham, North Carolina or Spokane, Washington, the apartment surge in New Rochelle, New York. So we've really relied heavily on examples, but also focused at the state level. And some of what we found is that there's just an expected trade off. So for example, there was an expected trade off with Singlestair where if we're going to have one stairway, then okay, maybe we get some affordability, but then that worsens fire safety and the trade off just didn't materialize. Or if we allow lots of new apartments, then we're going to see displacement and gentrification. Well we actually see that the places that build the most have been able to hold rents down the best and that has reduced displacement and gentrification. And actually class C rents have fallen the most in metro areas that have added a lot of new housing, even if the apartments are mostly class A. There are these expected trade offs and so we're trying to identify for policymakers when those occur and when they don't. And it's just something that we expect, but there's actually an opportunity to improve two things at the same time, like fire safety and housing affordability, or lowering rents and reducing displacement simultaneously and using real world examples as illustrations because our work is written in terms of dollars and percents rather than say, you know, p values or standard errors or coefficients.

Shane Phillips 58:00
Yeah. You know, we're in the middle of the incentive series and so I really think it's important that we acknowledge when there are trade-offs with policies because there very often are and you know, not everything is just win-win, but sometimes there are win-win solutions. And so I think your work is helping highlight that here. And I do want to really underline your point about the importance of just sharing actual real world examples. I think like you, I travel around and talk about research and my book on other things fairly frequently. And I think the number one question I get is like, who's doing it right? Like who should we be looking to? And I think the work that you guys are doing to lift up those examples and, and really explain what's happening has been super, super valuable. So thank you guys. Thank you all the whole Pew Charitable Trust team and Alex Horowitz, you in particular for joining me here on the housing voice podcast.

Alex Horowitz 58:54
Great to be with you. Thanks for hosting.

Shane Phillips 59:01
You can find more info on Alex's work. More show notes and a transcript of the interview on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials and I'm on Bluesky and LinkedIn at Shane D. Phillips. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.