The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed
9th July 2024
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. These challenges are at the root of a mounting housing crisis that has spread to nearly every part of the country and is damaging our economic productivity and our environment.
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Beyond the elevator itself, you’ll find a byzantine mess of absurdities and contradictions behind the U.S. construction industry’s slowness, inefficiency and expense. For example, Americans cannot use the latest heat pumps — a critical tool for fighting climate change by electrifying heating systems — because of the same sorts of barriers imposed by U.S. regulators. Instead, Americans rely on obsolete heat pumps that don’t have a market abroad. And plumbing codes in America require an entire network of ventilation piping that has been deemed largely unnecessary in much of the world.