Overview of The Great American Elevator Tragedy | The Mistakes Series
This Revisionist History episode uses the humble elevator to tell a bigger story about American housing, building codes, and how well-intentioned rules can make cities less livable. Malcolm Gladwell, newly enthusiastic about “YIMBY” housing reform, explores why the United States has far fewer elevators than other wealthy countries and why they are so much more expensive to build. The episode centers on a single code change pushed by Glendale, Arizona fire inspector Greg Victor, which helps illustrate how a pursuit of perfect accessibility can create unintended barriers to building affordable, accessible housing at scale.
Main Argument
The episode’s core idea is that American elevator policy reflects a broader planning mistake:
- The U.S. often demands the largest, most universally accommodating version of infrastructure.
- Those standards can drive up costs so much that the infrastructure gets built less often, or not at all.
- In trying to serve the most extreme edge cases, the system ends up excluding many ordinary users, especially people in smaller buildings, older adults, and people with disabilities.
Gladwell frames this as the “perfect is the enemy of the good” problem.
Why American Elevators Are So Expensive
Stephen Smith, founder of the Center for Building in North America, explains that elevator costs in the U.S. are inflated for several reasons:
Labor and installation practices
- Elevator work in the U.S. is highly unionized and specialized.
- Unlike in Europe, elevators are often assembled in factories and then disassembled/reassembled on-site in cramped shafts.
- This adds time, complexity, and cost.
Oversized cabin requirements
- U.S. elevators are generally much larger than those in Europe and much of the rest of the world.
- The larger size is tied to accessibility and emergency concerns, especially stretcher access.
- But those larger dimensions make elevators harder to fit into mid-rise and small apartment buildings.
The housing effect
- Because elevators are so expensive, many small apartment projects simply skip them.
- That means fewer new buildings are accessible to people who use wheelchairs, walkers, or have mobility limitations.
- It also makes housing more expensive overall.
Stephen Smith’s Personal Lens
Smith’s interest in the issue is not just theoretical:
- He lives in a five-story Brooklyn building without an elevator.
- He has a chronic health condition that has made stair climbing difficult at times.
- That personal experience sharpened his view of how a lack of elevators limits everyday life.
He sees the issue as a major hidden cost in American urban design: new buildings that are technically legal but effectively inaccessible to many people.
The Greg Victor Mistake
The episode builds to a specific code change proposal by Greg Victor, a Glendale fire inspector and later fire marshal, who submitted an amendment to the International Building Code.
What Victor wanted
- He argued that elevators should be able to accommodate a fully extended stretcher.
- He proposed making them even larger—around seven feet long.
Why it mattered
- The proposal came at a time when U.S. elevators were already the biggest and most expensive in the world.
- Making them larger would further increase costs.
- The likely result: even fewer buildings would include elevators at all.
The key irony
Victor was trying to improve emergency and accessibility outcomes, but the change likely reduced access in the real world by making elevator installation economically impractical in many buildings.
The Bigger Lesson
The episode argues that standards should balance ideal outcomes with practical reality:
- A perfect solution for rare emergencies can create worse outcomes for everyone else.
- If a rule makes elevators too expensive, you may end up with no elevator at all.
- That means fewer accessible homes, less mobility, and a more exclusionary housing market.
Gladwell treats Greg Victor not as a villain, but as a cautionary example of a recurring policy mistake: sincere, safety-minded regulation that ignores cost and produces the opposite of its intended effect.
Key Takeaways
- The U.S. invented the modern elevator but now builds fewer of them than many peer countries.
- American elevator rules emphasize size, stretchers, and emergency edge cases, which raises costs sharply.
- High costs discourage elevator installation in smaller apartment buildings, especially affordable housing.
- This creates a hidden accessibility crisis in cities.
- The episode’s central thesis: chasing perfection in building codes can make the world less fair, not more.