The ups and downs of a home with an elevator

If you’ve ever lived on the sixth floor of a walk-up building, you’ve probably had days where asked yourself, “Why didn’t I go for that place with an elevator?” On eleven-bags-of-groceries days, even second-floor residents might curse flights of stairs that stress-test both shoulders and shopping bags, and occasionally result in chasing a can of beans back down to the lobby. But with apologies to Aerosmith, is the possibility of love in an elevator really worth pursuing?

When I lived in NYC, the tiny, ancient elevator in our six-storey walk-up came in handy on moving day – but I always had to warn friends who were tempted by the “luxury” of that glorified dumbwaiter to avoid it in favour of the totally reliable stairs. During my seven years there, I had to call the fire department no less than 24 times to retrieve friends who ignored my advice.

Unfortunately, those living with a disability that makes stair climbing difficult (or impossible) have to rely on the elevator – and technology won’t recognize your right to freely come and go. You become its hostage any time it breaks down. An Oshawa woman recently had to take her case to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, after a knee replacement surgery coincided with major elevator repairs in her building, leaving her effectively trapped in her unit for months. In another well-documented case, residents of an Ottawa building had to live without a working elevator for nine months straight in 2014. And we won't even discuss the peril of being on a high floor during a power outage – as most of southern Ontario and the Northeast United States found out in 2003.

Living in an elevator building also brings added costs, which both owners and renters carry. Current estimates suggest that paying for the maintenance and repairs of just one elevator can increase your rent or purchase price by as much as 10-15 per cent. If the lift comes with a doorman – and this is increasingly the norm, in newer buildings – that cost rises by an additional 10-12 per cent, according to a NYC real estate blog.

Then there’s your neighbour. You know, the one who always cooks cabbage, or just smells like they do. The one who wants to talk to you endlessly about your cat, or their baseball card collection, or that one time they saw you in a totally different part of town and what a freaky coincidence that was, or how the super won’t fix their sink and maybe you could do something about it. This person, like a dog that knows when its owner is coming home, is always going to get on the elevator at the same time as you.

Even if you do manage to close the doors before they jam their hands in there, you still never know who you’re going to be stuck with. Call me crazy, but standing elbow-to-chin in a group of weirdly fragrant people – most of whom avoid eye contact by staring at the changing numbers like the second coming is only a few floors away – is not my idea of a good time.

Sure, it’d be great to have an elevator on laundry day, or garbage day, or when you really need the bathroom, or when you realize you left your wallet nine floors above you. But by sticking to the stairs, you’re not only burning two to three times the calories you would walking at a brisk pace on a flat surface – you’ll also never have to worry about knowing how to survive an elevator free fall.