¶ Introducing YIMBY and The Elevator Mistake
Pushkin I am. I am proud to say a yimb yes in my backyard. I have come to my ymbi this recently, so I have all the zeal of the recently converted. Yimby stands for building as much housing as is humanly possible, performing stupid zoning laws, outdated building codes. Yimb hates minimum lot sizes, setback zoning, mandatory parking requirements, run control anything that makes building new things more expensive.
Nimby thinks that when it comes to cities, America peaked around nineteen ten and we should just roll back the zoning block one hundred years. Yimby walks through one of those absurdly picturesque New England villages or some breezy southern California beach town, and by the way, Yimby only ever walks or maybe cycles. Yimb never drives and asks where
the multi family apartment buildings. My social media feed is basically just other yimbi's shout out to Alicia courtyard urbanists 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.
So deep into this ever expanding series on mistakes. I asked myself, what would Yimbi's idea of a mistake be? What error, what miscalculation would most enrage the universe of Yimby? And upon consultations with my Yimbi comrades, I've found 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 YUMBI my new best friend, Stephen Smith, director of the Center for Building in North America. He will guide us through the tangled history leading up to mister Victor's massive air.
Greece has about half the elevators that the United States does, which is pretty surprising since Greece has a population of around ten million in the US. Is I don't know, three hundred and forty millions 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 Revision is 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? And 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 ymbie hear me, roar What do your friends say about your elevators?
And talk about building codes to friends? It's a good way to out of friends. You know, you cannot be serious.
You don't have long conversations with elevators with your friends.
Of course I do it drive them nuts about it elevators. You know, sometimes they'll ask a question about something and I got a little fun fact for them. But it's not a good way to keep friends to talk about elevators.
Till I am ers Stephen, I am that exception. Should I ever be at a party with you, Fronds, Should I ever be at a party with you, you have you 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 gonna talk about like handrails or windows, or you know, pushing it beyond elevators.
My producer is laughing in the background. The modern elevator
¶ America's Disappearing Elevators
is an American invention. The earliest elevators were made in the mid nineteenth 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 Howart Building on the corner of Broadway and Broome Street in Manhattan, Soho, which still stands. The vertical city in New York that grew up around the Hallwart Building was made possible by
Otis's invention. But at some point between then and now, the era of American elevator dominant 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 Ymby noticed, in particular Stephen Smith. This goes back a few years just after Smith has started a small
Ymby think tank center for building in North America. He'd been a journalist, then real estate, but his true passion, he realized, lay elsewhere building codes.
I mean, academia doesn't study building codes. The more prestigious you are an as an academic architect, you know, the more esoteric you're getting, and you know degrowth theory and you know things that are kind of divorced from the actual practice of putting one brick on another and nail and a piece of what. So you know, academia didn't cover it. I don't know who else was going to get into it, and you know, 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.
There was some it was a post on when it 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, twelve unit apartment building in Minneapolis and was sort of bragging about, you know, it's pretty affordable, and he was kind of listing. He was talking about the simplicity of the project. You know, it's like, doesn't have any parking, great, uh, doesn't have an elevator. And it kicked up sort of like a
firestorm on a Twitter. If you elevator, what about disabled? You know, I guess disabled people can just go and die whatever. And 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 and 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? And he was like, I don't know, twenty thirty thousand euros. I said, well, there must be some missunerstanding. There's no way an elevator costs twenty or thirty thousand euros netally doesn't make any sense. That's a small fraction, you know, in the US that would be I don't know, one hundred and twenty one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
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 twelve hundred square feet and there are five stories, seven apartments over a very popular vintage store.
What floor you want.
I'm on the third floor. And in Europe it would have been hard to stick an elevator in the building, but you could done it. I've seen I've seen floor plants from France especially, They're very good at sticking out, you know, a little spiral staircase and 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's building would have an elevator.
I believe, and for Steven this was a problem and with the result that when you had a period of your life, as I read in an elevator report, where you were effectively disabled.
Yes, I had some mysterious virus in twenty seventeen. Turned out to be the sort of long COVID like illness. Obviously not from COVID because it was twenty seventeen, And yeah, I had 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, might sleep twelve thirteen hours the 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 because the United States has somehow given up on the widespread adoption of a technology that it invented one hundred and fifty years ago. But you're building, no old person could ever move into your building.
I think I'm the oldest person who lives in the middle thirty seven. I mean this is I think I'm the oldest.
See, 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 I'm not just saying this because I'm yimbi fascinating exploration of a topic that I'm guessing few of you have ever thought about. One hundred and twenty two pages beginning with a sentence right out of some nineteenth century novel.
In late twenty twenty, 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. Some of the reasons why American elevators are so expensive are not surprising.
¶ Union Practices Drive Up Costs
Chapter four 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.
That'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. As 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 craned onto site, and in North America you're taking it apart. There was this I found a sort of newsletter from the iue C, the you know the North American Union, where the guy who runs it, or you know, one of the another general president or something is sort
of bragging to his membership. I mean he's trying to promote his leadership and he says, you know, you don't know how hard it is to convince an arbitrator that you know, you got to take apart this escalator.
At that point we were interrupted.
I apologize. Somebody's ringing my door out. 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 builka where were we This is like my kids with with their with their with their Magan tiles, their lego. Like they at the end of the day they take whatever they built and they smush it. Yeah, and then they rebuild it the next day. Yes, exactly like my kids with their magnetiles.
There are parts of the elevator I've seen in in settlement agreements or lawsuits. You know, most of the stuff happens behind closed doors are 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 at an arbitration case or legal case, I don't know what it was, where you know they're saying something like, you know, it's common practice for us to take something apart and put it off together, but you need to prove that you took it apart. So otherwise, what's to say you didn't just hang out playing on your cell phone in the shaft, and 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 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 US than europe. Elevator technicians get paid more. American elevated workers insist on doing dumb things like taking apart, already build elevators like small children with their magnetiles. But none of these things explain why an American elevator would be five times more expensive than its European counterpart. There has
¶ The Flaw of Perfect Design
to be an even more important reason. I oh, yes, there.
Is European cabins are roughly half. For 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 spaces. I mean, it's for accessibility. But exactly what it is it 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.
In Europe, Steven Smith's building would have an elevator because
Europeans are willing to live with pine 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 a speedy and if a 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, with 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, and most of all, since a tank costs fifteen million dollars, only super rich people would be able to drive to the store. In the spirit of trying to make the world a fair place, we've made the world in this one dimension and a much less fair place.
I would say, so, yes, you know, if you're sort of elderly, maybe you'll go into cardiac arrest, and it would 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 you know, most people will never be in that situation,
or frankly, if they are, they'll die. Anyway, The out of hospital cardiac or rest survival rate is very low, 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. So 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, like, oh, it's just a greedy developer or whatever, and just kind of ignored 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 a ligned with one hundred mistakes made over many years, but the one that really provoked my mbire was the mistake detailed on page fifty of Stephen Smith's Elevators, section three dot three dot two, committed in the Heedless Pursuit of Perfection by a certain Gregory, a Victor fire inspector of Glendale, Arizona. You want to design an apartment building in,
¶ The International Building Code
say to Peka, Kansas. You can't just put the stairs and windows and the fire exits wherever you want. You have to adhere to a set of common standards. And those standards are found in a very big book written and maintained and updated by a nonprofit called the International Code Council, based in Washington, d C. In one of those Bland office buildings 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 US Building Code, but it's called the International Building Code, the IBC. It has international aspirations. Everywhere in the country.
You st 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 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 nineteen ninety two, based on a proposal first made in seventeen eighty nine. You need a war or a couple of centuries to change the US Constitution. Not so the
International Building Code. It is a living document. And one of those people who set out to take advantage of this fact was Gregory a Victor of the Glendale Fire Department.
¶ Gregory Victor's Code Amendment
Greg Victor had white blonde hair, a stash aviator glasses. He grew up in the Phoenix area, served in the Air Force, as an elect trician at Binhoa Air Force Base during the Vietnam War, came home and became a fire inspector for the Glendale, Arizona Fire Department, retiring as the city's fire marshal in two thousand and seven. Quote. He was the driving force behind the fire safety codes
that are used in Glendale today. His obituary reads on a national level, he was instrumental in passing fire code to assure firefighters safety in Skyscraper's after nine to eleven. Let me just say that we of the Ymbie movement have no beef with Greig Victor personally. He served his country, his community, his profession. I am quite sure he was a fine and upstanding man. But he wanted perfection and he didn't understand that perfection comes with what is sometimes
an unbearable cost. So this guy lit's just so we have a someone who cares, who is passionate about elevators.
Yeah, he proposes. He says, you know, at the time, elevators were made to accommodate stretchers that are six feet four inches long. And he says, well, they're building a stadium in my jurisdiction.
He files an amendment with the International Building Code.
At the time, I don't believe Glendale had any apartment buildings with elevators. Maybe it had one or two, It had very few, if any. It still has very few, if any. And he said, the elevator is not going to accommodate our strutchers. And I don't think. I mean, I think that's maybe true in some sense, like when it's fully flat and extended. I find it difficult to believe that it did not accomodate a structure in any sense. I mean, strutchers do sort of prop up a bit.
Sometimes they're a bit collapsible, But in any case, he did not feel it adequately accommodated the stretcher. So he said, you know, the code should just say that the elevator must accommodate whatever structs. Sure, the jurisdiction's got. And this is not in the report. And I want to say, don't quote me, but I'm saying it in a public form,
so whatever, I'll just say it. What I was told was at the time, the elevator industry, this was in the early two thousands, the elevator industry had their own event, and so there weren't a lot of people from the elevator industry to push back. So there was some committee, some technical committee that's supposed to review this proposal. That's I think the most informed people in the process generally, and they said, well, there's two things wrong with us.
Number One, we can't just say it's got to accommodate the biggest stretcher you've got. I mean they say this, but you know what if someone orders a twenty foot stretcher. I mean, the lack of standardization just can drive everyone crazy. But secondly, you didn't really prove anything exactly, like, you know,
what is the harm? You know, can you try away the cost and benefits that wasn't done, So it comes back in another round when it's a little more This this is sort of a quasi democratic body, so all the building officials can vote and he's okay, Well the technical committee said no, but I come to you, the membership and say, you know, all fix it. So okay, it's not going to be any size. It's just gonna
be seven feet. I mean ours are I think he said there's or I don't remember, six foot seven, six foot eight, you know, seven feet will be big enough to I don't know, have an oxygen tank on the end or something like that, and it passed.
The United States already had the biggest elevators in the world, the most expensive elevators in the world. Elevators so big and so expensive that whenever someone was putting up a small apartment building or an affordable apartment building, they look at the numbers and shrug and say, ef it, we'll just go with stairs. And along comes Greg Victor of Glendale, Arizona, and proposes, to the most powerful body in the whole world of building codes, let's make them even bigger and
even more expensive. Let's make them seven feet long. So he comes back and with an amendment saying, okay, just make it seven feet and he takes that to the the.
Sort of the broader membership, but he kind of makes this, he makes this emotional case. Imagine if it was you. And there's always an emotional appeal in building codes and standards. I mean, sometimes it's about fire. In this case, it wasn't fire. In this case, it was you know, being you know, having going into cardiac arrest and someone couldn't thumb compressions on you or you get some sort of musculo skeletal injury from falling in the bathtub. Whatever you know,
something could happen. So it's an emotional appeal. And the issue with emotional appeals is they don't weigh things very well.
You couldn't look it up. International Building Code Code Change number G one forty three three h four Section three thousand and two point four. The International Building Code Amendment form is divided into three parts. Part one is where you write a paragraph explaining your change. Part two is where you give you reasons, and part three is cost impact and do you know what? Greg Victor answers to the cost impact question? None n O n e oh
Greg No. Revisious History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben ADAPFH Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Schakerji. Fact checking by Angelie Mercado. Our executive producer Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, original music by Luis Kira, Sound design and mastering by Marcelo diela Vera. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.