Tragedies raise a common question: “Where were you when . . . ?”

Twenty years after the terrorist attacks on the United States, attacks that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has labeled, “the most lethal in history,” SIOR members remember all too well. Listening to those members’ stories, it becomes clear that 9/11 carried a triple impact: the first was the immediate reaction. The second was the long-range impact on business. The third would be a more personal and ongoing remembrance.

“I was at my office,” recalls Allen Gump, SIOR, an executive vice president at Colliers in Dallas. On 9/11, he was with “Fults/Kennedy-Wilson Company. My entire office was glued to a few TVs we had scattered around the office. I don’t think many of us understood the full weight of what was happening at the time. I know I couldn’t immediately comprehend the amount of carnage.”

With locational variations, other recollections amount to the same, listening or watching the news and being horrified by what Tijuana-based Vicente Roché, SIOR, describes as “the great tragedy and loss of life.”

As one might expect, the JLL executive managing director of Industrial Occupier Services in Mexico has a unique perspective on international security, which, prior to the terrorist attacks, “was a little more relaxed and not nearly as vigilant. We didn’t have Homeland Security before, and of course, now it’s a formidable force in our country, and security along the border now has more measures than I ever witnessed in the 1990s.”

And yet, with nearly 2,000 miles of border to protect, “there are still areas that are very porous,” he says. Nevertheless, “we are night-and-day from where we were in the 1990s.”

There’s an inevitable change that takes place in the wake of unforeseen events. Just as we mark the moment in our memories, we also normalize under new conditions. We all accepted the annoyance of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, just as we’ve grown accustomed to increased airport scrutiny in the years after the attacks.

“Security has become baked in,” says Gump, “so now it’s seamless. And it’s become more of a natural process for Human Resources,” as much as for any special-ops security detail.

It also defined two different types of markets—and two different property types. Industrial properties are different in their security needs than class A downtown office assets, especially if those assets are in New York City as opposed to, for example, Pittsburgh.

“In a tertiary or secondary market, I don’t think there exists the heightened sense of security that exists in Manhattan or maybe LA or Chicago,” says Kevin Riley, SIOR, founder and president of Pittsburgh-based Totum Realty Advisors.

Clearly, this is not a lack of concern or awareness, and Riley says flatly that, “I’ll never forget that day.” But he says that, while hearts and minds might be with those who had a front-row seat, secondary markets have been largely spared “that practical connectivity. Reaction was simply not as pronounced in Pittsburgh.”

This is a particularly interesting comment, since, in addition to the Manhattan and Washington, DC, attacks, Pennsylvania also saw one of the four planes crash into its turf. Riley explains that he would join the commercial real estate industry some three years later, and while at the time, “I was heavily impacted by that day and the site of attacks on American soil, I was not yet in a position to respond in ways meaningful to the real estate community.”

But the lack of “practical connectivity” that Riley suggests also exists between most office and industrial assets. Says Riley, who deals in both of those food groups: “Outside of the headquarters office buildings of Fortune 500-type companies, stepped-up security here hasn’t been straight across the board.”

“On the office side, it has had an impact that still resonates today,” says Gump. “But from the industrial side, I don’t think 9/11 had that same direct effect.” This, he adds, varies naturally by the nature of the tenant, and such installations as data centers and medical manufacturing facilities engage in extra measures of security.

But he also says that much of this was already in place prior to 2001, as a natural precaution due to the nature of the business. But that doesn’t mean immunity from threat, and post-attack enhancements were inevitable, in both the office and the industrial assets, such as lobby screenings and more perimeter fencing around warehouses. “And we’re seeing guard stations that are actually being populated,” as opposed to the pre-attack days where we were all much more cavalier about such things.

Two decades is a long time, says Gump, and there are also natural evolutions that make for more efficient usage while secondarily aiding security. “The days of fitting as much square footage on a site as possible has gone away, for a multitude of reasons, and security is probably not at the top of the list.”

The events of 9/11 also ushered in an age of protections against domestic terrorism, which Gump says might be more of a recent concern. As a result, nowadays “it’s more common for landlords to want their warehouses fully secured with gates and locks, and in larger buildings, there’s often a ring road around the building to keep unwanted vehicles out.”

As security tightened in buildings and airports, so it did across the border. Of course, beefed-up border security has major implications for the supply chain. But, whatever the cause of potential supply-chain disruption, today, Gump says, “companies are far more aware of the need to keep extra inventory on hand, sometimes as much as 20% more than they would in normal times.”

But, of course, these have become the normal times, normalized by terrorism, border challenges, pandemics, and whatever the next Big Thing will be.

It has been said that we as a nation grew up with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. More recent events have contributed to that maturation. In an odd way, it might also be considered progress, if we are wiser, more cautious, and even more efficient in our supply-chain management and the scrutiny of potential bad actors. We know now what we didn’t know then.

Of course, processing such events takes time–time to heal. In fact, “for some people the state of shock and numbness can last a long time, sometimes for a number of years," says Priscilla Dass-Brailsford of Georgetown University Medical Center's psychiatry department, speaking to Scientific American.

But ultimately, healing involves getting back to work, doing our jobs, and caring for ourselves and our families. As that same article attests: “More often than not, people are incredibly resilient and can recover on their own and should be given the opportunity to do so.”

Which leads us to how these SIOR members assess the attacks on a personal level, and from the vantage point of two decades:

“Remembering 9/11 means the following to me,” says Riley: “Life is fragile, respect one another and cherish our first responders.”

Says Gump: “The anniversary is a stark reminder that we should never take for granted how secure our country is and how we must remain vigilant in its defense. The false sense of security we had was shattered that day.”

He agrees with Riley about the selflessness of the people who “are ready to put themselves in harm's way in order to save lives. Firefighters, policeman, paramedics, security personnel and regular people saved a lot of lives by risking their own. We owe so much every day to the first responders that put others’ lives ahead of their own safety.”

But he also sees the events of 20 years ago as a warning sign: “I fear both of these lessons have been forgotten by too many people, and there’s a new generation that does not fully comprehend that it can happen again.”

CONTRIBUTING MEMBERS

Allen Gump, SIOR

Kevin Riley, SIOR

Vicente Roché, SIOR