The conversation about retrofitting fire sprinkler systems in existing residential high-rise buildings almost always follows the same pattern. Someone raises the cost. Someone else says the building has smoke detectors. The owner says the occupants will object. A community official says there is no mandate, so there is no obligation. And the building continues to operate without the protection that every comparable new building is required to have.
This is the resistance. It is not new. It is not unique to any market or any building type. And in the case of residential high-rise buildings, the evidence accumulated over the past three decades makes clear that the resistance — however understandable — has a cost that is measured in lives and dollars that dwarf the cost of the systems being resisted.
The Resistance: What the Data Shows
In August 2006, the National Association of Home Builders commissioned a survey of 800 likely voters to gauge public attitudes toward residential fire sprinklers. The findings captured something that fire protection professionals had long observed in the field: most people believe they are already adequately protected.
Eighty-nine percent of survey respondents said they believed smoke detectors do an adequate job of protecting their family in a house fire. Sixty-five percent said sprinkler systems should remain optional, not required. When asked what they would be willing to pay for a sprinkler system in a new home, 28 percent said they would not choose sprinklers at any cost.
The survey is nearly twenty years old. The attitudes it documents are not. The belief that smoke detection alone provides adequate protection, the resistance to cost, and the preference for optionality over mandate are arguments that fire protection professionals encounter in every retrofit conversation today. The NAHB survey did not create that resistance. It simply measured it.
What the survey could not measure — because it had not yet happened — is what those attitudes cost when they are acted upon in a building that subsequently has a fire. The three cases that follow provide that answer.
The Results: Three Cases That Answer the Objections
Case Study 1: Marco Polo Condominium, Honolulu — The Cost of the Decision Not to Retrofit
The Marco Polo is a 36-story residential condominium in Honolulu, built in 1971 with 568 dwelling units. It was not required to have sprinklers when it was constructed. In 2013, a fire in the building caused $1.1 million in damage with no injuries. Following that fire, the building’s owners received a retrofit estimate of approximately $4.5 million — roughly $8,000 per dwelling unit.
The board of owners voted against the investment. The reasoning reflected the same attitudes the NAHB survey had documented seven years earlier: the probability of another fire was low, the cost was real, and the obligation was not mandated.
On July 14, 2017, a fire broke out on the 26th floor. Four people died. Thirteen others were injured. Two hundred dwelling units were damaged or destroyed. Estimated direct damages exceeded $100 million. Litigation costs added further to that total.
The board declined a $4.5 million investment. The result was a $100 million fire, four deaths, and a building that will carry that history permanently.
The Marco Polo case answers the cost objection directly. The retrofit was not the expensive option. It was, by an order of magnitude, the least expensive one. The question the board faced in 2013 was not whether to spend $4.5 million. It was whether to accept the risk of a loss that proved to be more than twenty times larger.
Case Study 2: Robert Saligman House, Philadelphia — Retrofit Is Achievable in an Occupied Building
The Robert Saligman House is a 10-story, 180-unit Section 8 affordable housing building in Philadelphia. The building was fully occupied when the retrofit began in 2014. Residents were relocated only during working hours — 8 AM to 4 PM — and returned to their apartments each evening. No more than five apartments were worked on at a time. When asbestos was discovered in the ceiling finish midway through the project, the contractor adapted by routing pipe along the concrete block walls without stopping work.
Oliver Fire Protection and Security completed the installation in 11 months. Total cost: $515,840 — $2,866 per unit. The owner’s insurance carrier responded immediately with a 20 percent discount across the entire portfolio.
The Saligman House successful outcome diffuses the objection of the disruption of occupants. In a building housing elderly residents on fixed incomes — a population that might be expected to resist disruption most strongly — the retrofit was completed without a single overnight displacement and without relocating a single resident permanently. The obstacle to retrofit is not engineering or logistics. It is the decision to begin.
Case Study 3: Grenfell Tower and Lacrosse Building — The Same Fire, Two Outcomes
In June 2017, fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, a 24-story residential building in London. The primary fire spread mechanism was combustible aluminum composite cladding on the building’s exterior facade. The fire killed 72 people and injured more than 70 others. The building had no automatic sprinkler system.
Three years earlier, in November 2014, fire broke out in the Lacrosse Building, a 21-story residential tower in Melbourne, Australia. The primary fire spread mechanism was the same: combustible aluminum composite cladding on the exterior facade. The fire spread rapidly up the building’s exterior. Zero fatalities. The Lacrosse Building had a full automatic sprinkler system.
Both buildings had the same material. Both had the same ignition dynamic. Both had fires that involved the exterior facade. The difference between 72 deaths and zero deaths was one design decision — the presence of a sprinkler system — made years before either fire occurred.
The Grenfell and Lacrosse fires are not a comparison of luck. They are a comparison of a decision made years before the fire that determined whether 72 people would die.
The Grenfell and Lacrosse cases answer the objection that sprinklers address only internal fires and that passive protection — fire-rated construction, compartmentation, and cladding standards — is sufficient for modern high-rise buildings. When passive protection fails, as it did in both cases, the active suppression system is the layer that determines the outcome.
From Resistance to Results
The NAHB survey found that 89 percent of respondents believed smoke detectors already protected them adequately. That belief is understandable. Smoke detectors save lives. But they do not control fires. They do not prevent flashover. They do not protect the occupant who cannot evacuate. And in the three cases documented above, no smoke detector determined whether people lived or died. The sprinkler system did.
The resistance to residential high-rise retrofit is real, persistent, and documented going back for at least two decades. It is also, in every case where a fire has tested it, demonstrably wrong about the cost and consequence of the decision not to act.
The Code Framework: What the 2024 IFC Requires
The 2024 International Fire Code addresses the existing building problem directly through two provisions that together cover the full existing high-rise residential stock.
Where Appendix M has been adopted, the requirement is straightforward: all existing high-rise buildings must be equipped with a sprinkler system designed and installed in accordance with NFPA 13.
Where Appendix M has not been adopted, Section 1103.5.4 applies. The provision creates a three-condition test. A building must satisfy at least one condition for the retrofit obligation to arise. The first condition is unconditional: any existing high-rise with an occupied floor more than 120 feet (36.6 m) above the lowest level of fire department vehicle access must be sprinklered throughout. No alternatives. No exemptions. The second and third conditions apply to buildings with occupied floors between 75 feet (22.9 m) and 120 feet (36.6 m). A building in that height range is required to retrofit unless it can demonstrate either two qualifying 2-hour interior exit stairways with appropriate fire-resistance ratings and opening protectives, or a fire alarm system that includes smoke detection in mechanical equipment rooms, electrical rooms, transformer rooms, telephone equipment rooms, corridors, elevator lobbies, and at doors penetrating interior exit stairway enclosures. A building that cannot satisfy at least one of those two conditions must install a sprinkler system throughout.
Both Appendix M and Section 1103.5.4 use the same compliance mechanism. After the fire code official issues written notice of the obligation, the building owner has 365 days to file a compliance schedule. That schedule must commit to full installation within 12 years. The fire code official is responsible for tracking the schedule and issuing violation notices where it is not followed.
The framework for overcoming resistance exists in the code. The cases that justify it are documented. What remains is adoption, enforcement, and the decision by building owners to act before the fire makes the decision for them.
The Call to Action
The resistance documented in the 2006 NAHB survey has not disappeared. The belief that smoke detectors are sufficient, the resistance to cost, and the preference for optionality over mandate are present in every retrofit conversation happening in every community in the United States today. That is not a reason for pessimism. It is a reason for advocacy.
The data available to the fire protection profession in 2025 is stronger than it has ever been. The Pew Charitable Trusts research published in September 2025 tracked every publicly reported residential fire death in the United States in 2023. The fire death rate in modern sprinklered multifamily buildings was 1.2 deaths per million residents. In older sprinklered apartment buildings, it was 7.7 per million. The difference is not statistical noise. It is more than six times. That number belongs in every retrofit conversation, in every community presentation, and in every letter to a building official who has not yet adopted the 2024 IFC retrofit provisions.
The code framework is in place. The case studies are documented. The mortality data is current. What the profession owes to the communities it serves is to put those tools to work.
For fire protection engineers and designers: specify NFPA 25 ITM requirements in every project document, identify the retrofit obligation in every existing building assessment, and advise building owners in writing when the systems they have are not adequate for the occupancies they protect.
For fire officials and AHJs: the authority to require fire safety certificate renewals conditioned on ITM compliance exists today, without legislative change. The authority to notify building owners of their obligations under Section 1103.5.4 exists today. Use it.
For building owners and property managers: the Marco Polo board knew the risk in 2013. They declined a $4.5 million investment. Four years later they faced a $100 million fire and four deaths. The question every building owner with an unsprinklered residential high-rise should be asking is not whether they can afford to retrofit. It is whether they can afford not to.
The resistance has been consistent for at least two decades. The results when unsprinklered residential high-rises have fires have been equally consistent. The profession has the evidence, the standards, and the legal framework to change that outcome. The next step is using them.
The resistance has been consistent. So have the results when buildings without sprinklers have fires. The data is clear. The decision is ours.
CASE STUDY REFERENCE
| Building | Outcome | Sprinklers? | Key Lesson |
| Marco Polo, Honolulu (2017) | 4 deaths, $100M+ damage | No — retrofit declined in 2013 | The cost of deferral exceeded the retrofit by 20x |
| Saligman House, Philadelphia (2014) | Zero disruption, 11 months, 20% insurance discount | Yes — retrofit completed in occupied building | Retrofit in an occupied building is achievable |
| Lacrosse Building, Melbourne (2014) | Zero fatalities — ACM cladding fire | Yes — full system throughout | Active suppression compensates when passive protection fails |
| Grenfell Tower, London (2017) | 72 deaths — ACM cladding fire | No sprinkler system | Same cladding failure, different outcome |