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July 8, 2024 
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 | By Suein Hwang Business, Economics and Technology Editor, Opinion |
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I am writing this from the top floor of a high-rise hotel in the middle of America. Every time I step into its elevator, I cannot help but admire it: its size, its heft, the satisfying thunk made by the massive doors before it heads to another floor.
The American elevator — something that most of us take for granted — is very special indeed. It's big. It's handcrafted. It's so expensive to build that it has been priced out of the very places where it is needed most. As such, it is an illustration of the nearly invisible forces that are a major driver of our current housing shortage.
This all became even clearer to me after I edited a guest essay by the housing advocate Stephen Smith that delves into these forces. Smith tells the story of how in 2021, a post-viral illness turned his third-floor Brooklyn walk-up apartment into a virtual prison on his worst days. A subsequent visit to his mother in Bucharest left him wondering why his mother's building in a poorer Eastern European country had an elevator when his building, built 25 years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, did not. Smith quit his job, founded a nonprofit dedicated to building codes and construction policy and embarked on an effort to learn the answer.
He concluded that America, the country that invented the passenger elevator, has lost the capacity to build it (as well as many other things). "Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system," he writes. "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."
Widen the aperture and you can find similar problems in many other places. "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," Smith writes. "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."
Read the full essay here:
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Guest Essay The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have SkyrocketedAn illness led Stephen Smith to study why America has so few elevators. What he learned explains why housing costs are so high. By Stephen Smith |
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