The REAL reason why America has so few elevators

Behind these doors lies one of the most important technological developments in human history and one of the most underrated. It's not as iconic as the automobile or as ostentatious as an airplane, but the simple unfussy elevator completely revolutionized how buildings are designed, how cities are laid out, how people get around, where we live, and where we work. There are millions of elevators in the world and an estimated 1 billion people set foot in one each day. In the US, people go up and down an estimated 2.5 billion miles by elevator every year. That's more than all the total miles traveled by train and airplane combined. If you stacked all of those elevator trips one on top of the other, you could go back and forth to the sun 27 times every year. Elevators are not just a convenience, they are essential to modern cities. Simply, you couldn't have tall buildings without elevators. But we don't build as many of them in America these days thanks to special interests and overbearing government and that is also reshaping cities in ways that make them less affordable and less accessible. This is the story of a technology that you [music] probably take for granted and that would be even more common if special interests didn't make them so expensive to build and maintain. >> Going up. >> The history of the elevator doesn't really begin in a skyscraper or an apartment building or an office. It begins right here in what is today Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan. And fittingly, we're surrounded by buildings that literally wouldn't be here if it weren't for elevators. It was right here where probably the most important development in the history of the modern elevator took place. This was the site of the New York Crystal Palace, which hosted the 1854 exhibition of the industry of all nations. It was here that inventor Elisha Graves Otis astonished onlookers with a demonstration of the first modern elevator. So, two things worth noting here. First, if that name sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen it over and over and over again, maybe without even noticing it. The Otis Elevator Company, now officially the Otis Worldwide Corporation, is one of the world's largest makers of elevators. And then, second, the elevator itself wasn't actually the remarkable thing that Otis demonstrated at that 1854 exhibition. What Otis had invented was a safety catch. As people watched, Otis hoisted himself into the air, then his assistant cut the cable holding the elevator up. Instead of plummeting to his death, the elevator stopped automatically. >> ALL SAFE, GENTLEMEN. >> Otis proclaimed to the crowd. See, elevators had actually been around for centuries in various forms. The ancient Greeks and Romans had rudimentary elevators. Inside the Colosseum, there were several lifts powered by slaves. French King Louis the 15th had an elevator installed in his private chambers at Versailles in the 1740s. By the early 1800s, mines and mills in England would use lifts to move goods and materials. But, elevators had an unfortunate reputation for being terribly unsafe. And as you can imagine, that made it really difficult to sell them. Otis opened his own elevator company about a year before that 1854 exhibition. But, in the first 7 months that he was in business, he made exactly one sale. The exhibition actually didn't do much to change that. When Otis died in 1861, the elevator was still regarded as something of a novelty. It wasn't until 1870 that the first elevator was installed in an office building here in New York City, and they didn't really become commonplace until the 1880s and 1890s. This is what New York looked like in the 1870s, just before the elevator revolution completely remade the city's skyline. But, it was actually two other inventions that helped take the elevator mainstream. The first was steel-frame construction techniques that allowed buildings to be built higher than 10 stories for the first time. See, an elevator might be a nice accessory in a seven- or an eight-story building, but once you start going higher than that, nobody wants to take the stairs. The other key invention was the electric motor. Powered by hydraulics or steam engines, elevators of the 1800s were painfully slow. It took about 2 and 1/2 minutes just to go from the lobby to the 10th floor. The electric motor changed that. [music] In 1913, when the Woolworth Building became the first American skyscraper to top 50 floors, it boasted elevators that moved 10 times faster. When the Empire State Building opened in 1931, its elevators moved at 6 m per second. That's almost as fast as elevators do today. Now, elevators completely reshaped the way cities work. And in places like New York, where there were natural barriers against expanding outward, the effect was particularly dramatic. There are over 80,000 elevators just in New York City today. By the way, almost all of this history is drawn from the book Lifted by Andreas Bernard. And one of the really fascinating observations that Bernard makes in that book is that elevators didn't just change the way cities get built and the way people get around them. They also changed the way we look at the world. They changed what we value. You see that most vividly in movies and TV shows, where elevators are often portrayed as these magical, mysterious portals. They aren't just a way to get from one floor to the other. They take us into the unknown. They ask us to consider new possibilities. Elevators changed the way we look at the real world, too. In the old days, it was the lower floors of buildings that tended to be more valuable. Maybe not right on street level, that's where you'd have shops and businesses, but the floor just above that, it was easy to get in and out, not many stairs, very accessible. The higher floors were less desirable, that's where students and servants would live or artists and bohemians. But the elevator flipped all of that upside down. Now penthouse apartments became more attractive and more valuable, and executives wanted offices at the top of [music] the building once they didn't have to walk all the way up there. No one wants to climb 50 stories. >> Just press a button and see, you're off. >> We want to be hoisted into the sky in a chariot of steel and dreams. Okay, maybe that's over selling it. The point is elevators completely overhauled the way people live and work. They are among the most essential [music] technologies in modern cities, yet we tend to take them for granted, or at least we do [music] until they stop working. >> Going nowhere. >> If you live in a big apartment building or you work in an office, you probably take an elevator every single day, and it's pretty routine. As long as everything works the way it's supposed to. A University of Illinois study found that the average person gets annoyed if they have to wait more than 28 seconds for an elevator to arrive. But when the technology does what it's supposed to, we tend not to think about it at all. It's a little bit like using a pen, you know, when you're writing with it, it just kind of disappears into the background. You don't think about the ink and the roller ball, it just becomes an extension of your hand. The the philosopher Martin Heidegger, he called this zuhanden zeit or ready at hand. It's that feeling that you have anytime a tool or a technology just kind of disappears and becomes an extension of yourself. Until the the pen runs out of ink, or until the [snorts] elevator doesn't show up, and then suddenly, very abruptly, you become aware of the tool's existence. You might take an elevator multiple times a day and never give it a second thought until it's broken. I guess I'm taking the stairs. A broken elevator isn't just annoying. There are 30 million Americans with mobility issues or disabilities. For them or for parents with kids in strollers, a broken elevator is a real problem. And that's especially true when the broken elevator affects a mass transit system or public housing. In New York City, the Housing Authority was sued by the Federal Justice Department in 2018 over an astonishing backlog of elevator repairs. And even though it has improved in recent years, the average elevator outage in 2025 in New York City public housing projects lasted more than 7 hours. That's an 18% increase from the previous year. For me, a broken elevator could mean an annoying climb up a bunch of flights of stairs, but for somebody in a wheelchair, it might mean a a missed medical appointment or the inability to get to a grocery store. Oh, and uh getting a broken elevator fixed, that's not cheap. The Center for Building in North America reviewed annual expense reports for apartment buildings and co-ops in New York City and Washington D.C. and found that landlords spend an average of $5,000 per elevator annually on maintenance, repairs, and inspections. In Europe, the costs are much lower. Annual costs for maintenance and repairs in Spain are about a quarter as much as they are here. See, we might not think a lot about an elevator until it stops working, but we think even less about the elevators that never get built in the first place. >> [music] >> In the United States, we have more than 1 million elevators, which sounds like a lot, but compared to other countries, we're actually falling way behind. The US has about 3.1 elevators per thousand residents. On a per capita basis, France and Germany have three times as many elevators as we do, and some other countries have a whole lot more. Now, of course, in the United States, we have more single-family homes than places like France and Germany, where people are more likely to live in apartment buildings. And that's true, but then you'd have to think about this comparison. New York City has roughly the same number of people as the entire country of Switzerland. And unlike in the rest of America, most people in New York City don't live in single-family homes. In fact, a greater percentage of New York's population lives in an apartment building than Switzerland's does. But despite that, Switzerland has twice as many passenger elevators as NYC. Stephen Smith, whose research informed a lot of this video, estimates that it costs about $150,000 to install a basic four-stop elevator in New York City. That same elevator only costs about $36,000 to install in Switzerland. So, we've got these higher maintenance costs, higher installation costs, and hey, if something costs more, you're going to get less of it. And that's definitely true when it comes to elevators in America. >> Going down. >> So, why does the same elevator cost four times as much to install in New York City as it does in Switzerland? I mentioned Stephen Smith a moment ago. This is the 122-page report that he wrote in 2024 for the Center for Building in North America. The entire thing is an attempt to answer that single question. A question that he says was first posed to him when a friend from Rome visited him in New York. I read it, so you don't have to. Smith says that there are two big reasons why American elevators cost more to install and [music] repair. First, there are a lot of regulations. In some cases, these are well-intentioned. They're meant to ensure that elevators can accommodate wheelchairs or stretchers. And European elevators are also required to fit those things, of course, but the building codes used in America often require space for turning around or for additional people to accompany the wheelchair or gurney. >> [music] >> And requiring a bigger elevator means bigger tradeoffs. A larger elevator is a heavier elevator, which means that it requires more heavy-duty equipment. That adds costs. A larger elevator also takes up more space in a floor plan, and that means less space for apartments or businesses. That can [music] change the entire economic model for a building. In small apartment buildings that are three or four stories high, European regulations allow for smaller, cheaper elevators. >> [music] >> In the US, the size and cost of elevators mean that developers often choose not to include them. These rules were meant to [music] make buildings more accessible, but they've actually had the opposite effect. How are you? Not great, Bob. And that's just part of the answer. So, after reading Smith's report, I started doing some digging on my own, and I think the real culprit behind America's elevator shortage is labor unions. One of them in particular, the International Union of Elevator Constructors. >> You just opened the doors to your career, and you're on your way to the top [music] with the best union in the finest craft around. Welcome to the International [music] Union of Elevator Constructors. >> See, labor costs are the single biggest part of installing or fixing an elevator. It's one of the highest-paid specialty construction jobs in the US with an hourly wage of about $49 in 2023. And the union works hard to keep those costs high by limiting entry into the profession. In 2021, more than 1,500 people applied to join New York City's local union of the IUEC. Only 115 were allowed to join. As a result, there's a persistent shortage of workers capable of installing or repairing elevators. But that's not the only way that the union works behind the scenes to keep the cost of elevator construction well, >> [music] >> rising. The union has fought against efforts in some states to allow elevator constructors to cross state lines to find work. Elevators are the same everywhere, so a worker from New York can safely install an elevator in Connecticut, but by imposing these artificial barriers, local unions retain more power [music] over pricing. Like a lot of labor unions, the IUOE C also uses various tactics [music] to limit competition from non-union employers. In 2008, the New York City local union that's affiliated with the IUOE C admitted to running a long-standing racketeering scam, where it required non-union construction companies to pay unionized workers not to work. The scheme involved fake [music] contracts and fake timesheets, and all of it was backed up by the threat of disruptions [music] if the non-union shops didn't go along with the deal. But I think there's an even better example of how the union exerts its influence. So, in Europe, most elevators installed in new buildings are prefabricated. That means they're built in a factory somewhere, and then they're shipped in and installed. In the US, however, that's not how elevators are built, thanks again to the International Union of Elevator Constructors. When developers use prefabricated or pre-assembled elevators, union contracts often stipulate that their parts must be disassembled and then reassembled on site by union labor. As Smith highlights in this report, [music] that includes even really basic things, like redrilling holes in steel frames. One recent union contract charged $132.80 per hour for union members just to redrill holes in factory-made equipment. And none of this is happening by accident or with [music] good intentions. In 2011, IUOE C President Dana Brigham made that quite clear, saying that the union can't afford to allow factory-built elevators to become commonplace. But [snorts] this is quite silly. Imagine if you couldn't buy a prefabricated oven for your kitchen. Instead, you have to hire somebody to come to your house and build an oven from scratch out of sheet metal, wiring, and electrical components. Now, that would make any kitchen renovation a lot more expensive and more time-consuming. It's exactly the same with elevators. Now, from the very beginning, a key concern with elevator construction has been safety, going all the way back to Otis's exposition at Bryant Park. It's not enough to be able to lift things in the air, you also have to get them down safely. And if the trade-off for higher prices was more safety, we should be happy to pay it. It's not. Elevators in Europe and Asia are just as safe as those in America that take twice as long to install and cost three times as much. Fewer more expensive elevators mean that housing is more expensive. It means that apartments and offices are less accessible for millions of Americans who have difficulty with stairs. And it just makes life more difficult. The elevator revolutionized how people get around. We shouldn't let special interests shut the door on that.