New and Old #187

Friday roundup and commentary

The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed, New York Times, Stephen Jacob Smith, July 8, 2024

Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.

Similar themes explain everything from our stalled high-speed rail development to why it’s so hard to find someone to fix a toilet or shower. It’s become hard to shake the feeling that America has simply lost the capacity to build things in the real world, outside of an app.

Well, yep.

What does that mean in the real world?

The first thing to notice about our elevators is that, like many things in America, they are huge. New elevators outside the U.S. are typically sized to accommodate a person in a large wheelchair plus somebody standing behind it. American elevators have ballooned to about twice that size, driven by a drip-drip-drip of regulations, each motivated by a slightly different concern — first accessibility, then accommodation for ambulance stretchers, then even bigger stretchers.

The United States and Canada have also marooned themselves on a regulatory island for elevator parts and designs. Much of the rest of the world has settled on following European elevator standards, which have been harmonized and refined over generations. Some of these differences between American and global standards result in only minor physical differences, while others add the hassle of a separate certification process without changing the final product….

Not only do we have our own elevator code, but individual U.S. jurisdictions modify it further. More accurate and efficient electronic testing practices, for example, are still mostly viewed with suspicion by the nearly 100 boards and jurisdictions that regulate elevator safety in North America. (The exact number in the regulatory patchwork is hard to nail down.)

And this, which is absurd:

Architects have dreamed of modular construction for decades, in which entire rooms are built in factories and then shipped on flatbed trucks to sites, for lower costs and greater precision. But we can’t even put elevators together in factories in America, because the elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site. Manufacturers even let elevator and escalator mechanics take some components apart and put them back together on site to preserve work for union members, since it’s easier than making separate, less-assembled versions just for the United States.

This is a very good read. This isn’t left or right, pro- or anti-regulation per se. It’s basically common sense, which, as the phrase goes, isn’t so common. Read the whole thing.

How California Turned Against Growth, Construction Physics, Brian Potter, August 8, 2024

Californians began to create land-use restrictions that would curb growth, help stop environmental harm, and limit the influx of new residents. When this drove up property values, Californians then passed Proposition 13, which cut property taxes, reduced the government’s ability to fund services, and locked in the low-growth culture that had taken root.

And…wow:

In Los Angeles, post-war demand was so huge that virtually the entire city became one large housing factory. In his history of merchant building, Ned Eichler notes that “Many of the manufactured items used in a tract house…were made right in Los Angeles. The market was so large and so consistent that subcontractors, suppliers, and manufacturers, could achieve economies of scale selling only in this metropolitan area”.

And this:

Californians eagerly anticipated when their state would surpass New York in population (a large, constantly updating electric sign displaying the relative numbers was erected on the Bay Bridge.) There was often a “cheerful willingness” to raise taxes and pass bond issues to fund the new infrastructure, and local business interests supported a high rate of population increase.

He goes on to note the environmental costs of several decades of rapid growth, very much real effects, though I suspect today we could handle them better. But this is very interesting (my emphasis):

There were also less sympathetic reasons that Californians began to oppose growth and the arrival of new residents. While California had traditionally been a bastion of single family homes, by the late 1960s construction had shifted to building large numbers of apartments, which would inevitably be occupied by low-income residents. This was “perceived as a categorical threat to the detached culture of low-density residential life.” One California housing expert noted that “one of the most cherished property rights in our ‘free enterprise system’ is not the right to do what one pleases with one’s property, but the right to live in a neighborhood in which no more multi-family housing may be constructed.”

But I’ve barely gotten to the shift to anti-growth sentiment. There’s a lot here; read the whole thing. But I’ll leave you with this insight:

For better or for worse, California’s turn against growth reflected the will of the people.

Or at least, partly the will of the people. One of the major issues in dealing with opposition to building in all its flavors is the incentives at work: with any major building project, the harms will be concentrated and obvious to local residents (construction noise and dust, blocked views, increased traffic), while the benefits will be diffuse, abstract, and often accrue to people who don’t yet live there. There’s thus a fundamental asymmetry where opposition has a louder voice than support.

On Millennial Snot, The Upheaval, Dudley Newright, October 9, 2024

This is one of those things I read on Substack where I say, “Huh, this is interesting, but is this guy a lunatic?” I can’t tell if he’s a far-right writer or if he’s an observer of the far right making fun of them. But what he writes here in this piece expresses a real phenomenon and the reaction many people have to it.

This is one piece of it:

Middle-aged academics and politicians did not used to be so sweary. People with advanced degrees did not say “what the actual fuck” and “fuck right off” and deem their lessers “fuckwits” and “fucktards” 20 years ago. But today they love to cuss, liberals. They especially enjoy doing the high-low thing where they pair a beefy vocab word like “unreconstructed,” with a snippy teengirl-ism like “creepy,” or a working-class swear like “dipshit” or “shitheel.” This is supposed to say, I’m smart, but I’m also cool.

Excessive use of “like,” uptalk, and vocal fry – these were once considered unprofessional ways of speaking. But in the early 2010s a handful feminist linguists with Tumblr accounts wrote opinion pieces arguing that the way teen girls talk is actually like, totally valid. “Like” isn’t just a crutch, a semantically empty filler word for someone who’s not in command of her ideas, it’s a “lexical hedge.” Talking like a teen girl or catty gay became a way for boring straight white people to reposition themselves as youthful rebels.

He doesn’t seem to be making fun of the actual subcultures where this stuff originated, but rather white liberals who use it for signaling or status or hipness. I think what it comes down to is a lack of seriousness and maturity among a lot of highly educated left-leaning people.

I remember in school hearing stuff like “I don’t know to science” and “I wrote a thing!” or “I don’t want to adult today” and thinking these people are dumb. But they weren’t dumb at all. Make of that what you will.

The Pedestrian, Ray Bradbury

To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o'clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of 2053 A.D., or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar.

Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb-like building was still open.

One of the major themes in this very short story—so, again, read the whole thing—is people watching way too much television. And this was written in 1950. But what Bradbury imagines, in fact, is a world in which walking is illegal. Perhaps, at the peak of the postwar suburban consumer economy, that was a thing that could be imagined.

Look at this from Wikipedia:

The 60th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451 contains the short piece ‘The Story of Fahrenheit 451’ by Jonathan R. Eller. In it, Eller writes that Bradbury’s inspiration for the story came when he was walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles with a friend in late 1949. On their walk, a police cruiser pulled up and asked what they were doing. Bradbury answered, “Well, we’re putting one foot in front of the other.” The policemen did not appreciate Ray’s joke and became suspicious of Bradbury and his friend for walking in an area where there were no pedestrians. Inspired by this experience, he wrote “The Pedestrian”, which he sent to his New York agent Don Congdon in March 1950.

Just last weekend, when I wrote about Halloween night, I was thinking about how easy it would be to imagine none of the houses in my neighborhood are actually inhabited. Or put it this way: if during one of our night walks, every other human being disappeared, how long would it take us to realize that that had happened?

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Related Reading:

New and Old #62

New and Old #63

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