NYT Piece Uses Elevator To Explain Housing Costs and Other Woes

Stephen Jacob Smith, founder and executive director of the Center for Building in North America, used the elevator to explain why housing costs have skyrocketed, among other woes, in a guest essay for The New York Times (NYT). He begins with a personal story about how he had to climb stairs to reach his third-floor Brooklyn apartment post-pandemic, becoming dizzy and winded because he was ill. “On bad days, I became a prisoner in my own home,” he said. A few months later, Smith visited his mother in Bucharest, where her five-story building was equipped with a small elevator. Elevators, even in mid-rise buildings, are common in Europe, where code is harmonized. In North America, on the other hand, “not only do we have our own elevator code, but individual U.S. jurisdictions modify it further,” he wrote. Add to that the tight market for skilled labor and the strength of the union, and elevators become too cost-prohibitive for many developers. While the elevator helped our country grow into an “economic powerhouse,” with “the elevator-powered Manhattan skyline becoming the command center for the global economy,” today the cost to add an elevator in New York or many other American cities has skyrocketed. “A basic four-stop elevator costs about US$158,000 in NYC, compared with about US$36,000 in Switzerland,” he observed.