The Great American Elevator Tragedy | The Mistakes Series

The episode opens with Gladwell identifying himself as a YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard), a movement advocating for more housing construction, zoning reform, and rolling back regulations that make building expensive. From this perspective, he frames the episode's central question: why does the United States — the country that invented the modern elevator — have fewer elevators per capita than almost any other high-income nation, including Greece, a country with roughly 3% of the U.S. population?

Gladwell interviews Stephen Smith, director of the Center for Building in North America, who spent two years researching this question and produced a 122-page report titled 'Elevators.' Smith's interest was sparked by a viral Twitter post about a Minneapolis developer who built a three-story, 12-unit apartment building without an elevator. While living in France at the time, Smith realized that a comparable new building in Europe would typically include a small elevator costing around 20,000–30,000 euros — roughly five times cheaper than a U.S. elevator. This price disparity became the central puzzle.

Smith identified two major drivers of U.S. elevator costs. First, labor: the U.S. elevator workforce is highly unionized, and the union insists on disassembling factory-built elevators at the job site and reassembling them in the shaft — a practice Smith compares to children smashing and rebuilding Lego structures. This adds significant cost and time. Second, and more impactful, is elevator cabin size: American elevators are required to be roughly twice the size of European ones, purportedly to accommodate wheelchair turning radii and emergency stretchers. This size requirement makes elevators physically impossible to install in many smaller buildings and economically unfeasible in affordable housing projects.

The episode's dramatic centerpiece is the story of Gregory A. Victor, a fire inspector and eventual fire marshal for Glendale, Arizona. In the early 2000s, Victor filed an amendment to the International Building Code (IBC) — the national standard maintained by the nonprofit International Code Council — arguing that elevator cabins needed to be even larger (seven feet in length) to accommodate emergency stretchers used by his department. A technical committee initially rejected the proposal, noting it lacked standardization and cost-benefit analysis. Victor returned with a revised, emotionally charged appeal to the broader IBC membership, invoking scenarios of cardiac arrest victims unable to receive CPR in elevators. The membership voted to pass it.

Critically, on the amendment form's 'cost impact' section, Victor wrote a single word: 'None.' Gladwell and Smith argue this was the fatal error — a well-meaning but analytically hollow decision that made American elevators even larger, even more expensive, and even less accessible to the buildings that need them most. The episode concludes by framing this as a classic case of 'the perfect being the enemy of the good': in trying to optimize for rare edge cases (stretcher accommodation), American building policy has effectively eliminated elevators from a huge swath of the housing stock, leaving elderly, disabled, and chronically ill residents — like Smith himself, who suffers from a debilitating autoimmune condition — unable to live in buildings without elevator access.