Revisionist History - The Great American Elevator Tragedy | The Mistakes Series

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

A single line of a building code proposal filled out by a fire inspector in Glendale, Arizona has had a devastating impact on the way housing is built across the entire United States. Malcolm enlists Stephen Smith, Executive Director of the Center for Building in North America, to investigate.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bushkin. I am, I am proud to say, a YIMBY. Yes, in my backyard. I have come to my Yimbiness recently, so I have all the zeal of the recently converted. Yimbi stands for building as much housing as humanly possible, reforming stupid zoning laws, outdated building codes. Yimbi hates minimum lot sizes, setback zoning,

mandatory parking requirements, rent control, anything that makes building new things more expensive. Yimbi thinks that when it comes to cities, America peaked around 1910. And we should just roll back the zoning clock 100 years. Yimbi walks through one of those absurdly picturesque New England villages or some breezy southern California beach town. By the way, Yimbi only ever walks, or maybe cycles. Yimbi never drives.

And asks, we're the multifamily apartment buildings. My social media feed is basically just other Yimbys. Shout out to Alicia Courtyard Urbanist 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. Yimbi 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 found it. 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 Yimbi, 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 Mr. 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 10 million,

and the US is, I don't know, 340 million. It's 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 revisionist 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 Yumbi

hear me roar What do your friends say about your elevator Oh and talk about building codes to friends It's a good way to not at friends You know Wait are you You cannot be serious

You don't have long conversations With elevators with your friends Of course I do I drive them nuts about it Elevators You know sometimes I'll ask a question about something, like a little fun fact

for them, but it's not a good way to keep friends to talk about elevators standards. Stephen, I am that exception. Should I ever be at a party with you? You could be friends. Should I ever be at a party with you? You have Carplanche to trap me in a corner

and talk about elevators for two hours. I'm going to talk about something way more about like handrails or windows or, you know, I'm pushing it beyond elevators. My producer is laughing in the background. The modern elevator is an American invention. The earliest elevators were made in the mid-19th 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 Haworth Building on the corner of Broadway and Broom Street in Manhattan, Soho, which still stands. The vertical city in New York that grew up around the Haworth building was made possible by Otis's invention. But at some point, between then and now, the era of American elevator dominance 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? Yimbi noticed, in particular, Stephen Smith. This goes back a few years, just after Smith had

started a small Yimbi 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 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 in a piece of wood. So, you know, academia didn't cover it. I don't know, who else was going to get into it. And you don't really 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, back when it was called Twitter, and it was still good for this kind of thing. That went viral with some developer who had built a, a little three-story 12-unit apartment building in Minneapolis and was sort of bragging about, you know, it was pretty affordable. And he was kind of listing, he was talking about the simplicity

of the project. You know, it doesn't have any parking, great, doesn't have an elevator. And it kicked up sort of like a firestorm on Twitter. If you have an 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. 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 was the architect, how much is an elevator cost in Italy for a three-story building? And he was like, I don't know, 20, 30,000, euros. I said, well, there must be some misunderstanding.

There's no way an elevator cost 20 or 30,000 euros. Italy that doesn't make any sense. That's a small fraction. You know, in the U.S., that would be, I don't know, $120, $150,000. 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 1,200 square feet, and there are five stories, seven apartments over a very popular vintage store.

What floor are you on? I'm on the third floor. And in Europe, it would have been hard to stick an elevator in the building, but you could have done it. I've seen floor plans from France especially. They're very good at sticking a little spiral staircase in 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, this building would have an elevator, I believe. And for Stephen, this was a problem. And with the result that when you had a period of your life, as I read in the elevator report,

where you were effectively disabled. Yes. I had some mysterious virus in 2017. It turned out to be this sort of long COVID-like illness, obviously not from COVID because it was 2017. And, yeah, 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, I might sleep 12, 13 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 150 years ago. But you're building. No old person could ever move into your building. I think I'm the oldest person that lives in the building. How old are you? 37. I think I'm the oldest. See, but 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, 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. 122 pages, beginning with a sentence right out of some 19th century novel.

In late 2020, 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. Chapter 4 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, 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 is 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 cramed onto site. And in North America, you're taking it apart. There was this, I found a sort of newsletter from the IUC, 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. You know, 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 to one second.

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 building. Where were we? This is like my kids with their magnetiles, their Lego. Like, 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 magnet tiles. There are parts of the elevator I've seen in, in settlement agreements or lawsuits. You know, most of this 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 settlement agreements that should not be posted online, but are sometimes. And there's this one, I don't know, arbitration case or a legal case, I don't know what it was, where they're saying something like, you know, it's common practice for us to take.

take something apart and put it up together, but you need to prove that you took it apart, because 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 how 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 U.S. than Europe. Elevator technicians get paid more. American elevator workers insist on doing dumb things like taking apart already built

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 to be an even more important reason. And oh yes, there is. European cabins are roughly half. 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 U.S. and Canada. That's because number one, they don't require space for accessibility, but exactly what it is 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 where it's designed for, but you'll probably have to either back in or back out one or the other. In Europe, Stephen Smith's building would have an elevator

because Europeans are willing to live with pint-sized elevator. 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 as speedy and efficient 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 $50 million, 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 arrest 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. It's like, well, it's just a greedy developer or whatever. And just kind of ignore 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 lined with 100 mistakes made over many years. years, but the one that really provoked my Yimbiaire was the mistake detailed on page 50 of Stephen Smith's elevators. Section 3.3.2, 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, say, Topeka, 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 U.S. Building Code, but it's called the International Building Code, the IBC. It has international aspirations.

everywhere in the country used 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. The ICC is one of those shadowy groups that no one is at,

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 1992, based on a proposal first made in 17. You need a war or a couple of centuries to change the U.S. 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. Greg Victor had white, blonde hair, mustache, aviator glasses. He grew up in the Phoenix area, served in the Air Force as an electrician 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 2007. 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 skyscrapers after 9-11. let me just say that we of the Yimbi movement have no beef with Greg 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, let's just, so we have a, 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's not going to accommodate our stretchers. 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 accommodate a stretcher in any sense. I mean, stretchers 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 coach should just say that the elevator must accommodate whatever structure the jurisdictions 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 2000s. 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 didn't say this, but, you know, what if someone orders a 20-foot stretcher? I mean, the lack of standardization is going to drive everyone crazy. But secondly, you didn't really prove anything exactly. Like, you know, what is the harm? You know, can you try to weigh the cost and benefits?

That wasn't done. So he comes back in another round when it's a little, more, this is sort of a quasi-democratic body, so all the building officials can vote. And he said, okay, well, the tactical committee said, no, but I come to you the membership and say, you know, well, I'll fix it. So, okay, it's not going to be any size. It's just going to be seven feet. I mean, ours are, I think he said theirs are, I don't remember, six foot seven, six foot eight.

So, 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, F 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. 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 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 from compressions on you, or you get some sort of musculoskeletal 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 can look it up. International Building Code,

Code Change Number G143-0304, Section 3002.4. 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! Revision's history is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Benadaff Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakurgy, fact-checking by Angelie Mercado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, original music by Luis Scarea. Sound design and mastering by Marcelo Di Oliveira. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.