It was not my intention to make this building code week on the blog, but for some reason that has happened. So let's continue. Here is an interesting guest essay -- about elevators -- written by Stephen Smith for the New York Times.
Stephen is the founder and executive director of a Brooklyn-based non-profit called the Center for Building in North America. And what they do is conduct research on building codes, specifically in the United States and Canada, and then advocate for reforms.
Here's what he thinks about elevators (taken from the above essay):
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 Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system.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.
Here's how the US compares to a few European countries:
Nobody is marveling at American elevators anymore. With around one million of them, the United States is tied for total installed devices with Italy and Spain. (Spain has one-seventh our population, 6 percent of our gross domestic product and fewer than half as many apartments.) Switzerland and New York City have roughly the same population, but the lower-rise alpine country has three times as many single-family houses as Gotham — and twice as many passenger elevators.
And here's a set of cost comparisons:
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. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs and inspections all cost more in America, too.
If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to give the full article a read. It's highly relevant to our ongoing discussions around missing middle housing. If cities, like Toronto, hope to build a lot more apartment buildings (especially smaller-scale ones), they are going to need affordable and plentiful elevator options.
(Thanks to Michael Visser for sharing this article me.)
As many of you know, I am learning French, again.
One of the small things that I found really interesting in this week's class -- besides, of course, figuring out how the hell to use le subjonctif -- was the expression "en province." In France, this effectively refers to any place in the country that isn't Paris -- the capital city/region. And it turns out that many other countries employ a similar kind of vocabulary.
According to Wikipedia, people in Peru say "en provincias", people in Mexico say "la provincia", people in Poland say "prowincjonalny", and people in Bulgaria say "в провинцията", whatever that means. What is fascinating to me about this is that it implies a very capital and urban-centric mentality. You're either in the capital city or you're, well, in the provinces.
It's also not something that is used in either Canada or the US. In Toronto, you'll hear people say that someone is "up north" and, in Philly, you'll hear people say "down the shore" to indicate that they're headed in the general vicinity of the east coast. But as far as I'm aware, there isn't a specific term that is used to describe any and all lands that exist outside of our capital cities.
Maybe it's because Ottawa isn't our biggest city and so it would be silly to designate everything outside of it as being some sort of provincial non-capital territory. But I wonder if part of it is because we don't have the same urban-centric mentality. Could it be that we just don't value and think about our principal cities in the same way?
We know that, for a variety of reasons, more and more people are living alone. As of 2018, single-person households represented about 28% of all households in the US. This is up from 13.1% in 1960.
Here in Canada, single-person households became the predominant household type in 2016 (we're also at 28%) for the first time in Canada's 150+ year history. And the numbers are even higher for some European countries. In Finland, Germany, and Norway, more than 4 in 10 households are single-person.
Part of this has to do with people living longer. In Canada, 42% of people aged 85 or older (and living in a private household) live alone. But part of this is also cultural. Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world, but it doesn't have the highest percentage of single-person households. Although, the number is relatively high and increasing. It's nearly 40%.
Whatever the case may be, you could argue that there appears to be some sort of global trend line toward more people living alone. But here's an important question: Is this a good thing?