Adding sprinklers to older buildings is expensive, but it’s worth it

Housing is complicated in many ways, but one of the most fundamental ones is how to balance home quality, safety, and affordability. A Maryland law about sprinklers, and a proposal to strengthen it, illustrates this complexity.

In 2019, the state fire marshal mandated that all high rise residential buildings have sprinklers, including both renter or owner occupied buildings, and those built before such installations were required in 1990. Buildings would have to install sprinklers or an approved alternative fire safety measure by 2033. As this deadline has gotten closer, some opposition has sprouted up around the cost of compliance.

Some of that pushback is troubling. In a recent letter to the editor in the Post, a former Planning Board candidate who lives in an older condo building argued that the cost of installing sprinklers would cause owners to abandon their homes. The author went on to say this will hurt new housing supply, even though new buildings already require sprinklers.

It doesn’t really pass the smell test to be honest.

A supportive commenter gave a more believable, and more understandable reason to oppose the mandate: adding sprinklers to the unit they owned and rented out might force them to sell.

The cost concerns are legitimate, especially when you consider that condos, being more affordable than detached houses and typically representing fewer out of pocket maintenance costs, tend to be owned by less affluent people. As fire safety and suppression standards get better in newer buildings, there is a movement to identify lower-cost interventions, like allowing buildings to have a single staircase with wider stairs instead of two stairs, which can increase construction costs.

However a group pushing back against the sprinkler mandate for older buildings says on their website that people should “demand that the government void the sprinkler mandate, provide funding, cheaper alternatives, or the right to opt out!”

Individually some of these sound reasonable, and I’m all for providing alternatives. But taken together, these read as less of a coherent ask and more of an attempt to throw a whole bunch of darts at the wall to see what sticks.

There will be other owners after the current ones. Many of these units are occupied by renters now. What about them? While those people may have feelings different from the current owners regarding the mandate, it’s there for a reason.

Sprinklers, which actively fight fires and can greatly mitigate loss of life and property, strike me as well worth the cost in buildings without equivalent alternate mitigations. Especially when you consider that a property owner, be they a corporate landlord, a condo owner that lives there, or an owner that rents it out, are making decisions not just for themselves, but also for future residents.

They’re just part of the solution, though. Last year, state delegate Lorig Charkoudian introduced a bill following a terrible fire in her district for older buildings that already have to install sprinklers by 2033. A map produced by ABC 7 reporter Christian Flores shows there are over 70 older buildings in Montgomery County that fall under the existing fire marshal mandate.

The bill, which was introduced late in the session and ran out of time before it could be passed, would have required property owners to provide smoke alarms in public areas and notify tenants that a building doesn’t have sprinklers.

It may sound obvious that not all apartment buildings have sprinklers, but I’ve talked to multiple people in the wake of the fire who were surprised that sprinklers were not already universal. Needless to say, a fire is not when you want to find out you are missing a lifesaving tool. And honestly, when’s the last time you looked at your fire safety plan where you live, if you even have one? This is exactly the kind of thing the government is here to regulate.

Efforts to try to undo the fire marshal’s mandate or substitute it with alternatives that don’t make people safer would be better spent making the adoption of this requirement more manageable. Maybe there can be state funding for sprinkler retrofits, or some sort of tax credit for impacted individual homeowners, or low interest subsidized loans. It’s also worthwhile to explore alternatives that are still rooted in fire safety expertise.

If these buildings are truly as fire resistant as some residents claimed in a recent hearing, that’s fine, and people shouldn’t be burdened with expensive costs that don’t meaningfully increase safety. But it should be because the buildings have been determined to be safe without sprinklers, not because putting them in will be hard and expensive.

I spoke with Delegate Charkoudian about the issue and about any plans to reintroduce her bill from last year. She said that she is still determining the best path forward, but has spent the time since last session speaking with fire safety experts, the Department of Housing and Community Development, condo owners, apartment building owners, and other stakeholders to try to find the right balance. Like last year’s bill, a new bill would not create a new mandate but focus on making the mandate more effective and impactful.

We shouldn’t wait for the next tragedy to do something about fire safety. Perhaps fittingly, while I was working on this piece the building next to mine had an electrical fire. A sprinkler went off and quickly contained the fire. There were no injuries.