Population and Housing

[bravado]

Here's an educational and possibly counter-intuitive study about the risks of fire in housing types over the years.

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-anal...protection

[...] There are also concerns, particularly in high-rises, about firefighter access and the ability of residents to escape from upper floors during a fire. Beyond design, critics of multifamily housing have expressed concern about demographic factors, such as concentrations of older or lower-income residents, that have been associated with increased fire risk.2

However, these concerns are largely not supported by research, and, in fact, multifamily housing in the U.S. has been getting safer over time. Fire safety researchers have documented a downward trend in the number of injuries and deaths in apartment building fires since 1980.3 The rate of deaths in multifamily buildings, for example, fell from 7.1 deaths per 1,000 reported fires in 1980 to 5.2 deaths per 1,000 fires in 2023, a lower rate than in single-family homes.4 But to date, there has been little research on the relative fire safety of modern (post-2000) multifamily housing in the United States compared with other types of housing.

New research from The Pew Charitable Trusts now demonstrates that multifamily buildings constructed since 2000 enjoy far better fire safety outcomes than other types of housing, because additional safety measures, such as self-closing doors, fire-safe materials, and sprinklers have been adopted widely.

I feel like the fire safety story is one of those unspoken ways that unrelated things, like the Fire Department's opinions, can control our housing policy in un-scientific ways.