The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed
My mission to understand the American elevator began in 2021 when I came down with a crippling post-viral illness. The stairs to my third-floor Brooklyn walk-up apartment would leave me dizzy and winded, my ears ringing, heart beating out of my chest. At 32, I’d joined the 12 percent of Americans who report “serious difficulty” with stairs. On bad days, I became a prisoner in my own home.
A few months later, visiting Bucharest, I rode the elevator in my mother’s five-story building. A developer in a much poorer Eastern European country could afford to include an elevator, but the developer of my luxury five-story building in Brooklyn, built 25 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, could not? I quit my job in real estate and started a nonprofit focused on building codes and construction policy.
Through my research on elevators, I got a glimpse into why so little new housing is built in America, and why what is built is often of such low quality and at high cost. The problem with elevators is a microcosm of the challenges of the broader construction industry — from labor to building codes to a sheer lack of political will. These challenges are at the root of a mounting housing crisis that has spread to nearly every part of the country and is damaging our economic productivity and our environment.
Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.
Similar themes explain everything from our stalled high-speed rail development to why it’s so hard to find someone to fix a toilet or shower. It’s become hard to shake the feeling that America has simply lost the capacity to build things in the real world, outside of an app.
The passenger elevator was invented and popularized in the United States, and helped our country grow into an economic powerhouse. The elevator-powered Manhattan skyline would become the command center for the global economy, where a wave of postwar redevelopment would turn emptied-out old tenements into rows of luxury elevator buildings, fortifying the city with a middle- and upper-income tax base to counterbalance the coming decades of urban decay.
