New York City has long struggled with waste collection and keeping its street clean, but a hidden issue has lurked behind the bags of trash strewn all over the sidewalks: costs. The Center for Building partnered with the Center for Zero Waste Design to calculate, for the first time, the costs to building owners of New York City’s particularly laborious method of waste collection and handling. At $75 per dwelling unit per month, waste handling costs to building owners – the costs of simply moving trash, recycling, and compost from building courtyards, basements, and waste rooms to the sidewalk, not including city collection – add up to more than 1 percent of the median household’s income. Our report discusses the monetary and other costs of New York City’s system, and presents a containerized alternative that would improve housing affordability in the city and keep the streets cleaner. The report is also summarized in a piece for Vital City.
Category: Reports
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Small Single-Stairway Apartment Buildings Have Strong Safety Record
The Center for Building in North America coauthored a report with the Pew Charitable Trusts on single-stair apartment buildings, with a focus on cost savings and the safety track record in New York City and Seattle. On the cost side, we found that a second stairway for a mid-rise apartment buildings costs roughly $200,000 to construct. On the life safety side, we combined NFIRS data and reports of home fire fatalities from the U.S. Fire Administration, which we joined with property-level data in New York City, through which we found no evidence of any fire fatality attributable to the lack of a second exit in any of the more than 4,000 single-stair apartment buildings of at least four stories in the city. Similarly, we manually reviewed records of fatal fires in Seattle and found the same.
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Elevators
We approach the issue of high elevator costs and low availability in North America from a comparative perspective, drawing on experiences in Europe in particular to examine the issue through the lenses of affordability, access, accessibility, codes and standards, and labor. We present the first public comparison between costs in the United States and our high-income peers in Europe (both for installations and ongoing items like maintenance), as well as the most up-to-date comparison of global elevator stocks. We look at the cost drivers, in three main categories – cabin sizes, labor productivity, and technical codes and standards unrelated to cabin size. We look at a few different cases of how other countries approach various issues related to elevators, from how China retrofits elevators into occupied walk-up apartment buildings (common in Europe too, but almost unheard of project in the U.S. and Canada) to France’s recent tightening of building accessibility requirements to Poland’s efforts to improve technical and vocational education to meet the labor needs of the elevator industry in the wake of its accession to the European Union.
Finally, we present practical advice to policymakers in the U.S. and Canada who want to bring elevator costs down to earth. The report’s author is available to answer questions from reporters, industry professionals, policymakers, or anybody else at stephen@centerforbuilding.org.