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 Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system.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.

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Behind the dearth of elevators in the country that birthed the skyscraper are eye-watering costs. A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland.

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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.

Opinion | Why Are Housing Costs So High? The Elevator Can Explain Why. – The New York Times