Stephen Jacob Smith is the executive director of the Center for Building in North America. Allie Cannington is the managing director of advocacy at the Kelsey, a disability-forward housing organization.
In December, Seattle City Council upended the city’s zoning rules to allow for four-story apartment buildings on every residential lot. It followed in the footsteps of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which did the same earlier in the year. In 2024, California legislators passed a bill legalizing up to 10 units on each plot of land, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) is following a similar, but less ambitious, playbook.
These reforms aim to boost the affordability of U.S. housing stock by building the “missing middle” — townhouses or small apartment buildings, denser and more affordable than single-family houses.
One of us has spent over a decade advocating for more missing-middle housing; the other uses a wheelchair and would mostly be locked out of living in such housing. The reason is that many of these buildings will share a common feature, or lack thereof: They will be walk-ups, built without elevators. And the ones that do have elevators will be more expensive than they need to be — in part because of the unintended consequences of a 1988 law designed to increase accessibility.
The United States, according to our research at the Center for Building in North America, has become one of the last high-income countries to still build walk-up apartment buildings. America and Canada’s elevators are the most expensive in the world, and the U.S. has fewer of them per capita than any high-income country with available data. Less than 6 percent of housing is accessible to the more than 30 million American adults with mobility disabilities.
In Europe and other high-income countries, small, new three- or four-story apartment buildings with a handful of units typically come with a simple elevator — even when not required. In the U.S., developers avoid installing elevators for small buildings since the high cost can wreck a project’s economics. Even at the Kelsey — a disability-forward housing developer where one of us works — high elevator costs often break otherwise viable financial models.
Even for developers who don’t particularly care about accessibility, walk-ups are a problem. Tenants and buyers are not excited by having to climb multiple flights of stairs multiple times a day. Developers’ confidence in the money they can make with walk-ups starts to drop off as the buildings grow beyond a second floor. If a costly elevator isn’t in the budget, projects don’t get built at all, driving down supply and driving up rents and home prices.
Unless U.S. elevator rules change, townhouses and small apartment buildings without elevators will, for the most part, remain the only viable forms of affordable, missing-middle housing.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the high costs and low availability of American elevators, but one direct lever the federal government has is the 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act. The law was intended to promote accessibility in housing but, in a twist of fate, it contributes to making the installation of an elevator in a small apartment building almost impossible.
The FHAA requires that buildings with at least four apartments must have “an accessible route into” an apartment. It doesn’t go into details beyond that, but it does say that complying with a private-sector standard published shortly before the legislation was passed “suffices to satisfy the requirements.”
This is where the contradictions start, and accessibility for small buildings falls apart. That standard and associated rules list minimum dimensions for elevator cars for new buildings. But that’s only if an elevator is provided, which is not required. The minimum dimension standards for an elevator for a small apartment building are much larger than actually needed for accessibility. The exact rationale for this size has been lost to history, but it might relate to a turning radius necessary for wheelchair users to press buttons that are placed directly next to the door. Other countries simply put the buttons on one of the side walls — no turn needed.
Abroad, the basic contours of accessibility rules are similar: For small buildings, a developer can choose to omit an elevator. But developers in Western Europe rarely use this loophole, since European elevators are relatively inexpensive and easy to add. Elevators for a small building in high-income countries like France or Germany cost around $50,000 after adjusting for cost-of-living differences and typically take up a bit more than 30 square feet on each floor. In the U.S., they can push $200,000 and consume more than twice the amount of floor space.
States around the U.S. are starting to confront the problem of high elevator costs and low housing availability. Lawmakers in Maine and Washington are rethinking the rules that have contributed to the predicament.
But without clarity from the federal government on the FHAA, there’s only so much cities and states can do about the minimum size of elevator cars, perpetuating this trend of new small apartment buildings without elevators.
Guidance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development could clarify what a close reading of the act already shows: Elevators that fit wheelchairs increase accessibility in smaller buildings when there is risk of not having an elevator at all. This would make developers more likely to include small elevators in small buildings, where they otherwise often choose to forgo them altogether.
Clarification from the federal government on elevator sizes is not going to fix the nation’s elevator market overnight. Cities and states would still need to change their own rules. And elevator accessibility standards are far from the only thing driving up costs in ways not found abroad — there are also American building codes’ stretcher requirements, a raft of more technical fire-safety rules, a general regulatory disconnect from the global parts market and labor agreements that make installing, maintaining, servicing and modernizing elevators more labor-intensive than elsewhere. But the issue of elevator accessibility standards is the one that the federal government has most immediate leverage over, and thoughtful guidance would be a win-win for both affordability and accessibility.
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