YIMBY 101: Elevators, Point Access Blocks, And More

It’s story time, people! One bitterly cold winter morning in 2015, I braved snow and ice to walk from my apartment in Milwaukee Junction to a nearby industrial building. I had been contracted by a “real estate development” firm— I put that in quotes because of the looseness with which we often throw around such terminologies- to work on adaptive reuse, construction management, and project planning for a portfolio of projects clustered in two separate areas.

This particular building was a blocky, three-story warehouse building with a long warehouse section with a north-light roof. It had, like all of the other buildings in the neighborhood, once been related to automotive manufacturing– the property of a motor company, if I recall correctly, and, I believe, later associated with the Jam Handy empire. I learned the shape, infrastructure, and mechanicals inside and out, ranging from several hulking forced-air furnaces that supplied a bare minimum of heat in a less-than-air-sealed thermal environment to the six main interior areas, plus a series of linear infrared furnaces that heated the warehouse area. Electrical service came in through three panels in the front of the warehouse area. The account numbers and meter numbers never quite matched up on buildings like these, and there were often what I called either phantom accounts or phantom meters. The DTE call center employees and I became best friends. Nothing worked quite right.

But the building did have power and had been relatively continuously occupied, even if only minimally, over the years. There were roof leaks, sure– but it wasn’t like another building of ours across town, in which the entire roof and heavy timber structure had collapsed and the floor sloped in a Willy-Wonkian or Escherian fashion toward a pit in the middle of the lot. (That building was later demolished after the company assembled an ambitious but half-baked proposal for a bazillion dollar hospitality and project that included a food hall, which everyone was obsessed with in 2015-2016).

So, I had extremely low hopes when I was asked to bring an elevator technician out to inspect the infrastructure for a centenarian elevator system installed with the building itself. This was a passenger elevator, mind you, located in the office part of the warehouse. Some of the infrastructure looked newer, like the buttons– perhaps midcentury or later, but what did I know?

We had managed to get the doors of the elevator shaft open, and I peered down into the abyss from the first floor— really, just a few feet of a drop to the bottom of the shaft- to see a murky pool of what looked like oil or possibly just black water sitting on top of concrete. Ominous, certainly. I then set out to figure out the electrical system, which sat in a sort of mechanical room off the main hallway along with a giant industrial air compressor (nonfunctioning). This was scary, even to me as someone who revels in exploring abandoned spaces with weird stuff in them– a giant, rusty metal box filled with weird wires poking out and ancient electronics. I would wait for the technician rather than try my own hand at it.

 

The Elevator Lives

I introduced myself to the technician when he arrived. He was a fit, older gentleman in resplendent Midwestern workwear of plaid, denim, and work boots.

”Nat?! What kind of name is that?” 

“Uh, short for Nathaniel,” i managed, and he let out a hearty chuckle.

”Nuh-than–yell,” he mouthed, curiously. “Well, there’s a new one!”

I don’t know, man, it’s in the Bible? It’s not exactly a new name.

Anyway. I showed the technician the elevator panel, which, based on various placards and forensic analysis, seemed to date from the building’s construction about a hundred years prior.

“It’s kinda scary,” I said, fully expecting him to recoil in fear as many a tradesperson had done. (We had a great company whose technician refused to come into the building because, he said, he didn’t feel comfortable parking his truck on the street).

“Naw,” he said, brushing me off as he opened his tool bag. He began to poke around with a multimeter and voltage pen.

It wasn’t more than a few minutes of fiddling with bits that he felt confident in throwing a switch to energize the device. A faint hum of 220v power coursed through the rusty machinery.

”Well, we’ve got power!”

“It works?”

“It sure should!”

From Elevator Master Technician’s Mouth to My Made Up Name’s Ears.

The elevator did require a few repairs, but they were mostly minor– like the door that didn’t quite open or close right. And shockingly, the main electronics were all fully operational, even encased in a rusty box in a quasi-vacant building. I would later be similarly floored by the functionality of ancient technology when touring the basement of a facility in Eastern Market, where a compressor fed ammonia coolant to a cold storage unit (we now use hydrocarbon refrigerants, which can circulate through copper rather than much more expensive stainless steel required for ammonia).

Machines, it turns out, often work for a long time if they’re well-maintained, whether we’re talking about a centenarian elevator or my parents’ 1993 Volvo wagon (that they replaced finally in 2020).

This is also perhaps a good metaphor for the machine that is Detroit. A machine that, be it said, was not well-oiled for a long time.

But I digress.

 

Why Elevators, Why Now

Anyway, whether we’re poking around in a mechanical room in a centenarian warehouse or trawling social media for good commentary on urbanism, life can be kinda wild. Sometimes, you make new friends on the internet because one person finds another person talking into the social media void about housing development and the two of you hit it off and nerd out about modular construction. Sometimes, this leads to the new friend to send you a copy of a technical report about elevators from the Center for Building in North America.

Written by Stephen Smith, it was a riveting report, and one that, I thought, had some important takeaways for thinking about how we can reform policy and innovate in the construction industry. I thought about the elevator anecdote from 2015 because it highlighted this peculiar intersection of misperception (by young, new real estate developers, terrified at the prospects of having to replace an exorbitant piece of mechanical equipment) with expert technical knowledge, in an age where expert technical knowledge is somewhere between lacking and openly reviled in the public discourse. (I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been told, “yeah, I get that you have a degree in this, but you’re wrong, because my perception is more important”).

Elevators are a significant tool for mobility and accessibility that enabled urban density in the first place. Smith also notes that elevators are effectively a form of public transit, even though they’re not considered one in common discourse– except perhaps in discourse lamenting the “verticalized suburbs” of high-rises.

Major Takeaways

The report notes how a mess of interactions between building code, labor standards, and other regulations make elevators both expensive and rare in the United States– even when controlling for the ubiquity of single-family by-right zoning. Greece, indeed, leads the world in the prevalence of elevators at 41 per 1,000 people– who knew? We certainly didn’t. The United States is dead last for all of the developed countries for which we have data, with 3 elevators per 1,000 people, behind Canada (4), the Netherlands (5), and even Japan, which is tied with Argentina, of all places (7).

Unsurprisingly, elevators cost 2-3 times more to build or to retrofit in the United States than they do in Europe or other parts of the world. Whether for installation in new construction or retrofits in existing buildings, timelines are also much longer.Highlighting a particularly stark comparison of the cost of installing a Schindler 3300 MRL Electric Traction model, at $35,348 in Vaud, Switzerland in 2020, versus the cost of installing a Kone MonoSpace 300 DX MRL electric traction model in New York City for $157,856.

A lot of this is the product of labor, and ZipRecruiter notes quite cushy salary and wage data for elevator installers. Unions are a big driver of this, but there are plenty of non-union markets in which elevators still cost quite a bit of money to install. Some of this is perhaps a tradeoff against what Smith notes is a higher level of risk for elevator installers, namely a fatality rate higher than many other trades. The comparative lack of safety for the worker comes at a tradeoff of elevators being extraordinarily safe in the United States– so safe, in fact, that there aren’t really federal data to even track fatalities involving elevator users because there are so few. Ironically, the report notes a higher rate of fatality in elevator workers in Europe than in the United States. Still, how is it possible that an elevator should cost five times more in the United States than in Switzerland, one of the wealthiest nations in the world?

It’s also the fact that most jurisdictions mandate much larger sizes of elevators than in European countries. This is done in the name of safety and accessibility. An elevator generally has to be able to fit, say, a stretcher or gurney, which effectively doubles the minimum size. But, as Smith points out from personal experience with disability, the comparative lack of elevators– skipped in the construction and planning process as a matter of the astronomical cost- may well be a far greater hindrance to accessibility and mobility. It’s a good example of how well-intentioned overregulation inadvertently creates as many if not more problems than it solves.

There are some safety requirements that are probably welcome, but don’t need to cost as much as they inevitably do as a matter of trade cartel pricing– periodic inspections (that are far more expensive in the United States and Canada than in Europe or elsewhere, for example) or often mandatory emergency call systems that could help a trapped person in a broken elevator.

Smith also refers to the code section in question on which building officials rely to mandate elevators, noting that the elevator mandate comes from what he characterizes as a misinterpretation of federal standards:

In buildings where a required accessible floor or occupied roof is four or more stories above or below a level of exit discharge, not less than one required accessible means of egress shall be an elevator complying with Section 1009.4.

He goes on to note that “according to those involved in drafting the model code, ‘a required accessible floor’ is a reference to federal law. As long as federal law allows only the ground floor of a multifamily building to be accessible, adopted building codes generally impose no further requirements.”

Curious!

It gets complicated when you consider different definitions of floor access– especially around the fact that commercial building code is used basically for anything other than single-family buildings in many jurisdictions, untenably driving up costs for multifamily construction (but certainly great for the NAHB, about whose successful lobbying and general iniquity I could write many an article– perhaps another day!).

 

How Do We Fix It?

The report is light on proposing its own conclusions, suggesting that more research is needed to look at the interactions between federal standards, building code (that, the report notes, is called “international” even though it’s really only used in the United States). Most notable is the examples from European multifamily typologies that rely on what are known as point access blocks rather than the traditional double-loaded corridor setup that is most common in the United States. The idea here is that a PAB provides a sort of spatial “core” around which apartments, stairs, and an elevator can be clustered, as opposed to having all apartments accessible via a long, continuous corridor. I think that the PAB model makes a lot of sense, and most recently I enjoyed staying in a charming, 1900s building in Spain that featured a PAB setup with an ultramodern elevator around which the historic staircase was wrapped– similar layouts are included in Smith’s report.

Combined with the lively YIMBY discourse around single-stair reform in building code– or other discussions of reforms around fire code– there is a lot to dig through here, combined with the elevator conversation.

Returning to the ancient elevator example for a moment: as someone with a decent amount of experience in the trades, I’m still frequently in awe of the actual magic of skilled craftsmen. That someone could look at this rusty box of wires, knobs, tubes, capacitors, and switches, shrug, throw a switch, and get the machine close to working order— was baffling to me.

I suppose people have said the same thing to me when I walk into an abandoned building and see possibility rather than simply dysfunction or disrepair. Financially speaking, this represents an unacceptable level of risk to a conservative investor or potential homebuyer. But more generally, psychologically, it represents an inability to imagine beyond what is— toward what could be. My wife, for example, is far better than me at getting stuff done and making vital decisions to move a process forward, but I’m generally better at conceptualizing possibility beginning in abstraction. When we were renovating our house, a lot of our approaches differed in her demanding to see a concrete representation of something in its finished form before beginning a construction process. In contrast, I suffer too much from the “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality because I can be quite impatient in this regard, even, ironically, with all of my ostensible background in planning.

Successfully striking a balance of these two wildly different mindsets, though, means that you’re able to conceptualize a finished product and move it along effectively.

Someone will look at a water-damaged ceiling and think, “ope, there’s $10,000! Let’s get out of here!” Or, they look at a roof that needs to be replaced and write off the entire idea of buying the house, even if everything inside looks perfect. It requires cost, guesswork, and risk, and sometimes the risk is more perceived than real.

The same is true with thinking through the process of construction innovation or policy innovation around building code or land use. It requires thinking outside the box– whether that box is a stick-framed, site-built box, or a huge elevator. I will be writing more about point access blocks, single-stair construction, and the question of code reform in the coming months. In the meantime, it feels like the discourse here is indeed going up (I’m sorry, I had to figure out how to end with some sort of pun).

You can read the full report here. Or, you know, get a friend who will send you a copy.