Jun 16, 2025
High-rise multi-family properties have become fixtures in the urban housing landscape, particularly in dense metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Des Moines. These buildings offer scale and efficiency but also introduce complex and often underappreciated security concerns. As cities expand upward, building owners a are increasingly tasked with demonstrating that their security programs can anticipate, prevent, and defend against known risks.
With nearly three decades of experience in physical and operational security across a wide range of property types, I’ve found that high-rise residential buildings—particularly those with mixed-use footprints or legacy construction—require a different level of planning, precision, and accountability than their low-rise or single-family counterparts.
A Unique Risk Environment
High-rise residential structures are dynamic environments. Residents, guests, delivery personnel, vendors, and service workers move through shared spaces daily. In growing downtown areas like those in Indianapolis or Milwaukee, short-term rentals and adaptive reuse developments have added further complexity, sometimes retrofitting old infrastructure with modern amenities—but without proportional upgrades to building security.
In these settings, vulnerabilities emerge not just from external threats, but from internal inconsistencies—policy drift, incident tracking/management, domestic violence, unchecked access credentials, tailgating, overlooked exit points, escorting, security technology being used as a convenience and mismatched surveillance coverage are potential areas to review.
Five Overlooked Security Gaps in Multi-Family High-Rises
1. Access Control That Doesn’t Scale
Traditional key fobs and coded entry systems often fall short in high-occupancy properties, especially when not paired with deactivation protocols, audit trails, or multi-factor authentication. Resident turnover and shared access points (like parking structures and elevators) create easy targets for tailgating or unauthorized re-entry by former tenants.
What to assess:
How is access tracked?
Is there a protocol for revoking credentials at lease termination?
Are audit logs monitored and reconciled?
Does the technology have known vulnerabilities?
Brass keying, control, management
move-in/move-out/rekying processes
Escorts
2. Mailrooms and Package Zones as Exposure Points
In high-demand delivery zones, package theft and lobby intrusion are increasingly common. Many buildings lack secure holding areas or staff training to handle these growing logistics, making mailrooms a liability waiting to happen.
What to implement:
Surveillance for storage.
Access-controlled package rooms
Architectural funnel points that place staff in the path of people ingressing/egressing package rooms.
3. Potential Blind Spots in Surveillance Strategy
Surveillance is not just about coverage—it’s about the strategic positioning and visibility of cameras to deter and document.
Key focus areas:
Elevator interiors with view of the floor indicator
Main exits/entrances to the building, which includes all stairwells, subterranean corridors and secondary exits
Trash enclosures and shared storage areas
Rooftop amenities and garages
4. Emergency Egress
Blocked exits, broken alarms, or disconnected annunciator panels. In high-rise properties, these oversights are often only discovered during inspections, or worse, emergencies.
Checklist items:
Quarterly alarm testing and documentation
Illuminated, unobstructed exit signage
Evacuation plan updates with tenant training
5. Unstaffed Amenity Areas and parking garages
Did you know? Parking garages and lots are the third highest area for personal crime anywhere in the United States. Fitness centers, lounges, pools, and rooftop spaces are attractive features, but without adequate access control and visual monitoring, they introduce noise complaints, urban exploration, misuse, trespassing incidents, and liability exposure.
Foreseeability
Understanding how regional courts interpret foreseeability is essential to protecting both the property and the owner. In Illinois, foreseeability is assessed through whether a reasonably prudent property owner could have anticipated the risk.
Security consultants operating in markets like Indianapolis, Milwaukee, or St. Louis must not only understand the physical security of the property but also the broader regional legal context. Failing to anticipate a foreseeable threat—especially in neighborhoods experiencing increased foot traffic, crime, or transitional use—can leave a building and its owners legally exposed.
Data, Demonstration, and Documentation
My consulting approach is built around a simple principle: risks must be visible, validated, and demonstrable. I document many of these findings—good, bad, and sometimes absurd—in real-world environments on #OneJob, a curated collection of field assessments and overlooked vulnerabilities.
Conduct walkthroughs using a threat-oriented lens
Analyze area crime trends and correlate with site access points
Build visual evidence for court, including 3D maps, incident overlays, and annotated surveillance logs
Developers and property managers should bring confidence and clarity that a building’s security program can stand up to scrutiny, internally and in the courtroom.
The Value of Regional Experience
No two buildings are alike—and neither are the environments they exist in. A mixed-use high-rise in Milwaukee will have different challenges than a converted office tower in downtown Minneapolis. A residential skyscraper in Chicago’s South Loop will carry different risk patterns than a mid-rise near Kentucky. Knowing how to localize security planning is essential.