On the elevator's role in our skyrocketing housing calculus

2024-07-10T11:22:00-04:00

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. [...] 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.

Stephen Smith, through the New York nonprofit Center for Building in North America, has been exposing variables that undermine the housing market's intricate calculus in the form of building codes, cost of labor, zoning regulations, and the construction industry.

He says: "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 Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system.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," adding, "The United States and Canada have also marooned themselves on a regulatory island for elevator parts and designs."

Last year, New York City became the most expensive construction market in the world, with an average cost of $506 per square foot, according to an analysis from Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business.

On the comparative difficulty of family-sized apartment dwellings in North America

2024-05-24T12:04:00-04:00

One major consequence of this difference in design is that the North American double-loaded corridor buildings are much worse at providing family-sized units. To illustrate the point, we’ll go through the different sized apartments one by one, and compare the floor area and design. You’ll notice that the American plans have significantly more floor area for the same number of bedrooms, and have much more lightless interior space up against the common corridor to fill.

Stephen Smith is a former journalist and the Executive Director of the Brooklyn-based Center for Building in North America. His analysis of spatial challenges created by multifamily apartments and zoning conditions was featured recently in Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast. This is an adroit relaying of an issue affecting both developers and architects in pertaining markets and compliments an earlier 2021 report on post-pandemic trends in multifamily residential design from the website Propmodo.

Smith writes: "The merits of North American building and zoning codes can be debated, but the effect is clearly that apartments, in order to provide the same number of bedrooms and give everyone a window, must necessarily consume far more floor area than point access block designs possible in other countries. So if you’re looking for a family-sized apartment in the U.S. or Canada and finding that new buildings don’t have what you’re looking for, it’s not you, it’s not the architect, and it’s not ...

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On the elevator's role in our skyrocketing housing calculus

On the comparative difficulty of family-sized apartment dwellings in North America