The Great American Elevator Tragedy | The Mistakes Series

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1:55Bushkin.

2:04I am, I am proud to say, a Yimby. Yes, in my backyard. I have come to my Yimby-ness recently, so I have all the zeal of the recently converted. YIMBY stands for building as much housing as is humanly possible. Reforming stupid zoning laws. Outdated building codes. YIMBY hates minimum lot sizes, setback zoning, mandatory parking requirements, rent control. Anything that makes building new things more expensive. YIMBY thinks that when it comes to cities, America peaked around 1910. And we should just roll back the zoning clock 100 years. YIMBY walks through one of those absurdly picturesque New England villages or some breezy Southern California beach town.

2:48By the way, Yimby only ever walks, or maybe cycles. Yimby never drives. And asks, where are the multifamily apartment buildings? My social media feed is basically just other Yimby's. Shout out to Alicia Courtyard Urbanist from Chicago, who posts something about how building European-style courtyard apartment buildings will save the American Republic every day. And I am so down for every one of those tweets. Yimby stands at the intersection of righteous indignation and nerdiness, a street corner where I have lived my entire adult life. I am Yimby. Hear me roar.

3:32So deep into this ever-expanding series on mistakes, I asked myself, what would Yimby's idea of a mistake be? What error, what miscalculation would most enrage the universe of Yimby? And upon consultations with my Yimby comrades, I found it. A single line on a building code proposal filled out by a fire inspector in Glendale, Arizona, named Gregory A. Victor. Concerning, wait for it, elevators. This is the story of the great American elevator tragedy. Yeah, I could not find a high-income country that had fewer elevators per capita than the United States. Meet one of the crown princes of Yimby, my new best friend, Stephen Smith, director of the Center for Building in North America.

4:23He will guide us through the tangled history leading up to Mr. Victor's massive error. Greece has about half the elevators that the United States does, which is pretty surprising since Greece has a population of around 10 million and the U.S. is, I don't know, 340 million. That's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, a lot of people in Greece live in a little four-story, four-unit apartment building with a tiny little elevator. This is Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. some of you may be thinking I'm not seriously going to listen to half an hour on elevators, am I?

5:01and my answer to you is oh yes you are and at the end you will turn to your loved ones and you will say I too am now Yembe hear me roar

5:21what do your friends say about your elevator... Oh, and talk about building codes to friends. It's a good way to not have friends, you know? Wait, you cannot be serious. You don't have long conversations with elevators with your friends. Of course I do. I drive them nuts about it. Elevators, you know, sometimes they'll ask a question about something and get a little fun fact for them, but it's not a good way to keep friends to talk about elevators' technical standards. Well, Stephen, I am that exception. Should I ever be at a party with you? You could be friends. Should I ever be at a party with you?

5:52you have carte blanche to trap me in a corner and talk about elevators for two hours. I'm going to talk about something way more. We're going to talk about like handrails or windows or, you know, pushing it beyond elevators. My producer is laughing in the background. The modern elevator is an American invention. The earliest elevators were made in the mid-19th century by Elisha Otis of Vermont, whose startup, Otis Elevators, remains one of the world's largest elevator companies. Otis installed the world's first commercial elevator in the Haworth Building on the corner of Broadway and Broom Street in Manhattan, Soho, which still stands.

6:36The vertical city in New York that grew up around the Haworth Building was made possible by Otis's invention. But at some point, between then and now, the era of American elevator dominance began to sputter. If you were an ordinary working American who lives in a split level out in the suburbs and works in an office park, maybe you didn't notice. But you know who did? Yimby noticed. In particular, Stephen Smith. This goes back a few years, just after Smith had started a small Yimby think tank, Center for Building in North America. He'd been a journalist, then real estate. But his true passion, he realized, lay elsewhere.

7:20Building codes. I mean, academia doesn't study building codes. The more prestigious you are as an academic architect, the more esoteric you're getting and degrowth theory and things that are kind of divorced from the actual practice of putting one brick on another and nail on a piece of wood. So academia didn't cover it. I don't know who else was going to get into it. And you don't really get into construction because you love reading and writing. So there's just not a whole lot written about it. So I decided to do it myself. He raised money, set up shop, and right away, something caught his eye.

8:00There was some, it was a post on, back when it was called Twitter. It was still good for this kind of thing. That went viral with some developer who had built a little three-story, 12-unit apartment building in Minneapolis and was sort of bragging about, you know, it was pretty affordable. And he was kind of listing, he was talking about the simplicity of the project. You know, it was like, doesn't have any parking, great. Doesn't have an elevator. And it kicked up sort of like a firestorm on Twitter. If you have an elevator, what about disabled? You know, I guess disabled people can just go and die, whatever.

8:33And I remember thinking like, well, three-story building in America, I mean, they never have elevators. That's not that unusual. But at the time, I happened to be in France. I was thinking, well, wait a minute. A new three-story building in France generally does have an elevator. So why is that? And I asked my friend who's the architect, you know, how much does an elevator cost in Italy for a three-story building? He was like, I don't know, 20 ,000, 30 ,000 euros. I said, well, there must be some misunderstanding. There's no way an elevator costs 20 ,000 or 30 ,000 euros in Italy. That doesn't make any sense.

9:03That's a small fraction. You know, in the U.S., that would be, I don't know,$120 ,000,$150 ,000. Why on earth would an elevator be five times the cost in America as it is in Europe? He went back home, moved apartments, and suddenly the question was all he could think about. So you live in Brooklyn. I live in Brooklyn. I live in a five-story building. There are two units on each floor. It's on a very small lot. It's on a lot that's roughly, the footprint of the building is about 1 ,200 square feet, and there are five stories, seven apartments over a very popular vintage store. What floor are you on?

9:41I'm on the third floor. And in Europe, it would have been hard to stick an elevator in the building, but you could have done it. I've seen floor plans from France especially. They're very good at sticking a little spiral staircase in a very small elevator. You could have gotten an elevator in the building. There is no way in hell you could have gotten an elevator in the building with anything even conceivably close to our current rules. But in France, they would have done it. In France, this building would have an elevator, I believe. And for Stephen, this was a problem. And with the result that when you had a period of your life, as I read in the elevator report, where you were effectively disabled.

10:20Yes, I had some mysterious virus in 2017, turned out to be this sort of long COVID-like illness, obviously not from COVID because it was 2017. And yeah, I still do have a disease called POTS, where you stand up and your heart rate goes well, a lot of fatigue, probably an autoimmune disease that has not really been understood very well yet. And yeah, it was difficult. You know, there were definitely days where what happens is when you exert yourself, you pay for it physically in kind of intense ways. You get sort of brain fog and extreme fatigue. You know, I might sleep 12, 13 hours a day. and so yeah there were days when like I think it would have been nice to go for a walk and I didn't because I was on the third floor yeah in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the wealthiest city in the premier country in the world there is a brand new apartment building that is effectively off limits segregated from anyone who is not fit enough to walk up multiple flights of stairs and why?

11:23because the United States has somehow given up on the widespread adoption of a technology that it invented 150 years ago. But your building, no old person could ever move into your building. I think I'm the oldest person who lives in the building. How old are you? 37. I think I'm the oldest. See, but this is, the whole, this whole thing is just nuts. Yes, it is nuts. Smith spent two years trying to answer the question of why Americans gave up on the elevator. The result, entitled Elevators, is maybe the most comprehensive and, and I'm not just saying this because I'm Yimby, fascinating exploration of a topic that I'm guessing few of you have ever thought about.

12:10A hundred and twenty-two pages, beginning with a sentence right out of some 19th century novel. In late 2020, tired of my old Brooklyn apartment, historic and charming, but loud and full of maintenance hassles, I put my co-op unit on the market and set out to buy a new condo.

12:36We spend hours researching products online and deciding what to buy, but there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit the buy now button? The way we discover and compare things is evolving, happening faster and influenced by new forms of intelligent advice. But the underlying trust question doesn't go away. If anything, it's more important than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, they've been a trusted way to pay. And now PayPal can make the agentic era of commerce work for merchants, letting them maintain control of their brand, their customer relationships, so even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most still feels familiar and deeply dependable.

13:22Built for payments, growth, and agentic. PayPal Open, built for all business. Visit paypalopen.com to get started. Purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply. See paypal.com slash risk-management for details.

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14:40Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Some of the reasons why American elevators are so expensive are not surprising. Chapter 4 of Smith's magnum opus is entitled Labor. Labor is the elephant in the room of the elevator industry, he writes. The workforce that builds and maintains elevators is small and specialized and highly unionized, and nowhere are those things more true than in the United States. The most cost-effective way to build an elevator is to assemble the whole thing in a factory, then ship it to the building site and drop it in with a crane.

15:31That's what they do in Europe. But in the United States, the elevator union insists on assembling the elevators themselves. So everything is assembled in the factory, shipped to the building site, then disassembled and put back together in the cramped confines of the elevator shaft. Where it's really bad is the sort of sister industry of the elevators, which is the escalators. I mean, an escalator truly is almost fully assembled in a factory abroad and then crammed onto site. And in North America, you're taking it apart. There was this, I found a sort of newsletter from the IUEC, the North American Union, where the guy who runs it or another general president or something is sort of bragging to his membership.

16:14He's trying to promote his leadership. And he says, you don't know how hard it is to convince an arbitrator that you've got to take apart this escalator. At that point, we were interrupted. I apologize. Somebody's ringing my doorbell one second. Okay. I don't know whether that package was for me, but they're going to leave in the lobby because I don't have an elevator in my building. Where were we? This is like my kids with their magnet tiles, their Lego. Like, at the end of the day, they take whatever they built and they smush it and then they rebuild it the next day. Yes. Exactly like my kids with their magnet tiles.

16:53There are parts of the elevator I've seen in settlement agreements or lawsuits. You know, most of this stuff happens behind closed doors or literally in a tight shaft. And you don't get a lot of insight into it. But you see it in court cases and in settlement agreements that should not be posted online but are sometimes. and there's this one, I don't know, arbitration case or legal case, I don't know what it was, where they're saying something like, you know, it's common practice for us to take something apart and put it all together, but you need to prove that you took it apart because otherwise what's to say you didn't just hang out playing on your cell phone in the shaft?

17:32And so, you know, the practice is for you to sign your name on the part. So if you take it apart, the manager can see how you really took it apart. Now, as crazy as this is, it doesn't really answer the question. Yes, the elevator unions are stronger in the U.S. than Europe. Elevator technicians get paid more. American elevator workers insist on doing dumb things like taking apart already built elevators, like small children with their magnet tiles. But none of these things explain why an American elevator would be five times more expensive than its European counterpart. There has to be an even more important reason.

18:07And oh yes, there is. European cabins are roughly half. Let's say for a new six-story apartment building with a couple of units per floor, the cabin size in Europe is about half the size. Really, the whole rest of the world is about half the size that it is in the US and Canada. And that's because, number one, they don't require space for accessibility. But exactly what it is is never really written down, but probably something like a turning radius for a wheelchair. The European one will accommodate a wheelchair. In fact, that's what it's designed for. But you'll probably have to either back in or back out, one or the other.

18:47In Europe, Stephen Smith's building would have an elevator because Europeans are willing to live with pint-sized elevators. In America, we aren't. Which seems to make good sense, right? Because what if you had a heart attack and you're on a stretcher? You'd want your exit from your fifth-floor apartment to be as speedy and efficient as possible. Except that in insisting that elevators be really large, for those very rare occasions when a large elevator would be really convenient, you make the elevator so bulky that it can't fit in a lot of smaller buildings, and so expensive that no one trying to build affordable housing has the means to put an elevator in their building.

19:27With the result that if you're in a wheelchair, you simply can't live in Stephen Smith's building. And if you have a heart attack on the fifth floor, the medics are going to have to drag you down five flights of stairs. Have you ever heard the expression, the perfect is the enemy of the good? This is American elevator policy. This is like saying, too many people are dying in car accidents. Let's mandate that everyone has to drive to the store in a tank. Problem solved, right? Well, that problem solved. But now you have a million other bigger problems, like massively congested highways, torn up roads, no parking.

20:03And most of all, since a tank costs$50 million, only super rich people would be able to drive to the store. In the spirit of trying to make the world a fairer place, we've made the world in this one dimension and a much less fairer place. I would say so. Yes. you know if you're sort of elderly maybe you'll go into cardiac arrest and it'd be helpful to have an elevator that can accommodate a fully flat stretcher so you know someone can continue to do chest compressions on you while you go down but um you know most people will never be in that situation or frankly if they are they'll die anyway the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rate is is very low um but you know pretty much everyone gets to a point or at least if you're lucky in life where you can't really use the stairs but you could you know stand with a walker in a small elevator.

20:57So, yeah, we really look for these edge cases, try to solve them, and then kind of throw our hands up when people don't have elevators at all. It's like, well, it's just a greedy developer or whatever. And just kind of ignore the underlying economics of the situation, which was that if you make the elevator three to four times expensive, you get a lot fewer elevators. Trying to get to perfect when good is good enough is a mistake. And the road to mega elevators was lined with a hundred mistakes made over many years, but the one that really provoked my Yimbi-ire was the mistake detailed on page 50 of Stephen Smith's elevators.

21:34Section 3.3.2. Committed in the heedless pursuit of perfection by a certain Gregory A. Victor, Fire Inspector of Glendale, Arizona.

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24:42buildings not far from the Capitol. Anytime you see an international in a word in the United States related to construction, it's a lie. It's the U.S. building code, but it's called the International Building Code, the IBC. It has international aspirations. Everywhere in the country used to have its own building code, more or less, and then they've sort of become homogenized, harmonized over time. And so now there's a national code called the International Building Code, which forms the basis and really the vast, vast majority of every code. If you walk down a street and hate the way modern buildings look, or you don't understand why corridors in the hallway of your apartment building are so long, then you have a problem with the International Code Council.

25:22The ICC is one of those shadowy groups that no one has ever heard about that writes the rules of the modern world. And the document that they have so grandiosely named the International Building Code is, crucially, not set in stone. Interested parties can propose amendments. Those amendments can be voted on by a special committee or by the general members of the ICC. The International Building Code is not like the Constitution of the United States, which was last amended in 1992 based on a proposal first made in 1789. You need a war or a couple of centuries to change the U.S. Constitution. Not so the International Building Code.