Daniel sent us this one — he moved into a seventh-floor apartment here in Jerusalem, and the elevator was a hundred ninety-two centimeters by sixty-two. That's roughly the dimensions of a standing coffin. The movers couldn't get crane access from the neighboring commercial property, the whole thing was wildly expensive and stressful, and it got him thinking: if seven floors was that bad, what happens when all these forty-story towers going up around the city actually need people to move into them? Is mandating service elevators the answer? Can one elevator even keep pace in a building with hundreds of units? And are there any genuinely futuristic solutions — drones, platforms, something else — that might change the equation?
That elevator isn't just an inconvenience — it's a design failure that's about to become a crisis. And I say that as someone who's watched movers try to angle a couch through a doorway for forty-five minutes. The dimensions here are worth sitting with for a second. A hundred ninety-two by sixty-two centimeters — that's about six foot three by two feet. A standard queen mattress is a hundred fifty-two by two hundred and three centimeters. It literally does not fit flat. You have to bend it, fold it, or hoist it up seven flights of stairs.
Which is exactly what happened, I'm guessing. The stairs become the freight elevator.
They do, and that's where the cost explodes. There was a study in twenty twenty-three from the International Journal of High-Rise Construction — and yes, that's a real journal, I checked — that found moves into floors ten and above cost forty to sixty percent more than ground-floor moves in cities like New York and Hong Kong. And that's not just labor. It's the stairs, the disassembly, the insurance premiums, the time overruns. In Jerusalem, where so much of the older building stock has these tiny elevators designed in the seventies and eighties, the problem compounds. You're not just moving into a high floor — you're moving into a high floor through a mail slot.
The mail slot of urban density. So let's start with the elevator itself. Why are these things so small, and what actually happens when you try to move a couch through one?
The short answer is that passenger elevators were never designed for moving. They were designed for people. A standard residential elevator in a modern high-rise is typically about one point five meters by one point eight meters — that's five feet by six feet. That's the newer stuff. The older Israeli elevators, like the one in question, are even smaller because they were built to older standards — the Israel Standard Institute only started requiring larger minimum dimensions in residential buildings in the early two thousands, and even then, the minimums are tight. You're looking at roughly a meter ten by a meter forty for a four-person cab in some older codes.
A meter ten. So a person and a half.
And here's what's wild — a standard three-seater sofa is about a meter eighty to two meters long. A refrigerator is around seventy to ninety centimeters deep but a meter seventy tall, so it won't stand upright in a lot of these cabs. A queen mattress, as I mentioned, a hundred fifty-two by two hundred and three. None of this fits. So the movers have a few options, and they're all terrible. Option one: disassemble everything that can be disassembled. Option two: angle it through the elevator at forty-five degrees and pray. Option three: carry it up the stairs.
Option three being the one that makes movers hate you.
Option three is how you burn through a crew's goodwill in about twelve minutes. A flight of stairs is roughly three meters of vertical rise. Seven floors — let's say twenty-one meters, seventy feet. Now try carrying a solid wood dresser up that. The movers aren't just tired; they're calculating their hourly rate divided by the number of times they've had to rest on a landing.
You mentioned insurance premiums. Is that a real line item?
Moving companies carry liability insurance for damaged property and worker injury. Stair carries — that's the industry term — increase the risk of both. Dropped furniture, twisted ankles, herniated discs. Some companies charge a stair surcharge per flight, and I've seen quotes from Israeli moving firms that add anywhere from fifty to a hundred fifty shekels per floor per mover for anything above the third floor without elevator access. For a three-man crew on a seventh-floor move, that's potentially thousands of shekels in surcharges before they've even loaded the truck.
The hidden tax of vertical living is real and measurable. But let's talk about the actual solution that seems obvious — service elevators. What are they, and why don't all buildings have them?
This is where the terminology matters, because most people use "service elevator" and "freight elevator" interchangeably, and they're not the same thing. A service elevator is essentially a larger passenger elevator — maybe two meters by two point five meters, padded walls, higher weight capacity, often used for both moves and deliveries. A freight elevator is industrial-grade. We're talking capacities up to five thousand kilograms, doors up to three meters wide, reinforced floors. Think of the difference between a minivan and a box truck. Most residential towers install service elevators, if they install anything beyond passenger cabs at all. True freight elevators are almost unheard of in residential buildings.
Because of cost.
Cost and space. A freight elevator adds roughly two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars to construction costs, depending on the building height and shaft requirements. A service elevator is more like a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand. A standard passenger elevator is maybe fifty to eighty thousand per cab. For a developer building a thirty-story tower with two hundred units, skipping the freight elevator saves maybe half a percent of the total project cost. That's it. Half a percent. But that half a percent compounds across multiple towers in a portfolio, and developers are notoriously unwilling to spend on amenities that don't photograph well in a brochure.
"Luxurious freight capacity." Not the sexiest listing.
It's not, and that's exactly the problem. Nobody tours an apartment and asks to see the service elevator. But six months later, they're weeping into their moving boxes while a crew of exhausted movers tries to wedge a sectional through a door that's six inches too narrow.
The economics are misaligned. The developer saves half a percent upfront, and the residents pay a forty to sixty percent moving premium in perpetuity. Or at least every time they move.
And it's not just the move-in. It's every furniture delivery, every appliance replacement, every renovation project. If you live on the thirtieth floor and your washing machine dies, you're paying a delivery premium every single time. Over a decade of occupancy, those costs add up to far more than the developer saved by skipping the service elevator.
Which brings us to the scheduling nightmare. Even if you have a service elevator, in a building with a hundred-plus units, how does one elevator actually keep pace?
This is where it gets interesting from an operations standpoint. Let's do the math on a thirty-story tower with sixty units. A single service elevator, assuming thirty-minute round trips including loading and unloading on both ends — and that's optimistic, by the way, because a round trip to floor thirty with loading time could easily be forty-five minutes — can handle maybe two to three moves per day during peak hours. But on a move-in weekend, you might have twenty families trying to move simultaneously. That's a week and a half of moves crammed into two days.
You get queuing. Literal lines of moving trucks.
There was a case at The One tower in Toronto — eighty-five stories, four hundred sixteen units — where during peak move-in weekends in twenty twenty-four, residents reported four-hour waits for the service elevator. You're paying movers by the hour to sit in a loading dock. Some buildings have tried to solve this with dedicated move-in windows — you get a three-hour slot, say nine to noon on a Saturday, and if you're not done, you reschedule. But that requires management that actually enforces it, and in a lot of buildings, especially rentals, the management company is minimally staffed and maximally indifferent.
The indifference of property management is the great constant of urban life.
It's the one thing that scales perfectly across all building heights. But there are technical solutions to the scheduling problem that go beyond just hoping people don't all move on the same day. Elevator traffic modeling — it's a whole subfield — can optimize cab dispatching. Some newer buildings use destination dispatch systems where you book your floor in advance and the system groups trips efficiently. You could theoretically extend that to move bookings. Reserve the service elevator through an app, it arrives at your floor at the scheduled time, and the system automatically blocks out buffer windows before and after.
That requires the building to have a service elevator in the first place, which brings us back to the mandate question. Should building codes require them?
The International Building Code currently requires at least one passenger elevator per four thousand square feet of floor area in buildings over four stories, but there's no specific mandate for service elevators in residential towers. Some cities are starting to move on this. In twenty twenty-four, New York City proposed amendments to Local Law ninety-seven that would require freight elevators in buildings over thirty stories. The cost analysis suggested it would add one to two percent to construction costs — not nothing, but not prohibitive — and the livability benefits were substantial enough that the proposal got real traction.
One to two percent. So on a hundred-million-dollar tower, we're talking one to two million. Spread across two hundred units, that's five to ten thousand per unit. Amortized over a thirty-year mortgage, it's negligible.
Negligible, and yet developers fight it because upfront costs are more visible than long-term livability. But here's the counter-argument that actually has some merit: mandating service elevators takes up floor area. A freight elevator shaft with a three-meter-wide door requires more structural reinforcement, more lobby space on every floor, and it reduces saleable square footage. In a building where every square meter counts, that's a real trade-off. The question is whether the trade-off is worth it, and I'd argue the evidence says yes — a twenty twenty-five JLL study of luxury towers in Dubai found that buildings with dedicated freight elevators and move-in infrastructure commanded five to ten percent higher rents.
The market is speaking, just slowly. Ten percent higher rents more than covers the cost. But let's talk about the alternative that doesn't involve elevators at all — cranes and platforms. In the prompt, the movers tried to get crane access from an adjoining commercial property and were denied. How high can these things actually go?
This is where a lot of people have the wrong mental model. They picture a construction tower crane that can reach forty stories, and they think, just rent one of those for the afternoon. But tower cranes are dismantled after construction. They're not available for move-ins. What you can rent is a truck-mounted mobile crane, and those max out at around thirty to forty meters — that's ten to twelve stories. You can get larger mobile cranes that reach higher — there are models that go to sixty or even eighty meters — but they're enormous, they require street closures, they need outrigger stabilization that takes up multiple lanes, and in a dense city like Jerusalem, getting permits for that is borderline impossible.
Especially if you need permission from adjacent property owners.
And that's what happened here. The adjoining commercial premises said no. Maybe they didn't want the disruption, maybe they had liability concerns, maybe they just didn't feel like being helpful. It doesn't matter — the crane option was dead. And even if they'd said yes, you're looking at thousands of dollars in crane rental, plus a crew that knows how to rig furniture for lifting. It's not just a hook and a strap. You need proper slings, tag lines to prevent spinning, someone on the balcony to receive the load. It's a whole operation.
What about platform lifts? Scissor lifts, mast-climbing platforms?
Mast-climbing work platforms can reach twenty to thirty stories, and they're used in construction and window-washing. The problem is they need ground-level space for the base — typically a concrete pad or stabilized surface — and they need to be anchored to the building at intervals. You can't just roll one up to a residential tower and start loading sofas. The permitting alone would take weeks, and in Jerusalem's city center, where streets are narrow and buildings are built right up to the property line, there's often nowhere to put the base.
The crane-and-platform alternative is essentially a non-starter for most urban moves above twelve stories. Which means we're back to elevators — or we're looking at something more exotic. The prompt asks about drones. Is that a real thing, or is it the kind of thing that sounds futuristic and clever but collapses on contact with reality?
It's somewhere in between. Let me give you the state of play. DJI's FlyCart thirty — that's their heavy-lift delivery drone — can carry thirty kilograms up to sixteen kilometers. That's about the weight of a small armchair or a large box of books. Flight time is roughly twelve to eighteen minutes depending on payload and conditions. In twenty twenty-five, there was a pilot program in Shenzhen, China, where they used drones to move small furniture items into a fifty-story tower — lamps, chairs, boxes, that kind of thing. But here's the catch: they only served floors twenty through fifty, with a ground-based relay system. The lower floors were too close to street level for safe drone operation given the no-fly zone restrictions.
So you're not moving a refrigerator with a drone. You're moving throw pillows and houseplants.
Even then, it's not simple. Urban drone delivery faces a thicket of regulatory hurdles. In the US, you need FAA Part one-oh-seven waivers for operations over people and beyond visual line of sight. In Israel, the Civil Aviation Authority has been cautious about urban drone operations, especially in Jerusalem where security sensitivities are high. You've got no-fly zones, you've got weather constraints — high winds above thirty stories are no joke — and you've got battery life limitations that mean the drone is doing one trip every fifteen minutes. At thirty kilos per trip, moving the contents of a two-bedroom apartment would take days.
Drones are a gimmick for moves, at least for now. But what about for ongoing delivery? If you live on the fortieth floor and order a bookshelf, does a drone bring it to your balcony?
That's actually the more plausible near-term use case. Single-item delivery, not whole-apartment moves. Amazon's Prime Air has been testing exactly this, and there are startups working on balcony-landing drone delivery specifically for high-rises. But the weight limit is the binding constraint. Most furniture exceeds thirty kilos. Even flatpack stuff — an IKEA Billy bookcase in its box is about thirty-five kilos. A Malm bed frame is closer to forty. You're right at the edge of what current heavy-lift drones can handle, and that's in ideal conditions.
We're not replacing the elevator with a swarm of quadcopters anytime soon. But you mentioned flatpack. That seems like a parallel solution — design the furniture to fit the elevator, rather than redesigning the elevator to fit the furniture.
This is clever, and it's already happening. IKEA launched something they called Flatpack two point zero in twenty twenty-five — furniture specifically designed to fit into elevator-friendly boxes, roughly eighty centimeters by sixty centimeters. Sofas that break down into armrests, seat cushions, and a frame that each fit through a standard elevator door. Beds that assemble without tools and disassemble just as easily. It's not just about the initial move — it's about the fact that if you ever want to sell that sofa or move it to another room, it has to go back through the same tiny door it came in through.
The circular economy of furniture trapped on the seventh floor.
And some buildings are taking this even further. Singapore's Marina One Residences installed what they call move-in chutes — vertical shafts, about a two-foot diameter, padded, running from the loading dock to every floor. You drop boxes under twenty kilos into the chute, they slide down to a receiving area, and they get distributed. Residents there reported seventy percent faster move-in times. It's basically a laundry chute scaled up for moving boxes.
A laundry chute for your life. I love the image. But a two-foot diameter chute — that's sixty centimeters. You're not getting a floor lamp through that. You're getting boxes of books, kitchen equipment, clothing.
Right, it's for the small stuff. But the small stuff is most of what you own, by volume of boxes. The big furniture items still need the elevator or the stairs, but if you can take eighty percent of the boxes out of the equation, the elevator only has to handle the large items, and that dramatically speeds up the whole operation.
The move-in chute plus a properly-sized service elevator might be the sweet spot. But that's new construction. What about the tens of thousands of existing high-rises that are already built with tiny elevators? Are they just permanently expensive to move into?
They are, and this is where the economics get uncomfortable. If you're a renter, you absorb the moving cost directly. If you're an owner, you might pay it once or twice over a decade and not think about it much. But if you're a landlord, the hidden moving cost is actually a competitive disadvantage that you might not even be aware of. Prospective tenants don't typically ask about elevator dimensions during a viewing. They look at the kitchen, the view, the closet space. Then they move in, get hammered with a five-thousand-shekel moving bill that should have been two thousand, and they're annoyed before they've even unpacked.
They don't renew the lease.
Or they do, but they're slightly resentful, and that resentment has an address. This is one of those issues that doesn't show up in standard housing economics because nobody's measuring it systematically. But anecdotally, every property manager I've talked to has horror stories about move-in day. It's the single highest-friction moment in the landlord-tenant relationship, and it's entirely preventable.
Let's pivot to the regulatory question directly. Should cities mandate service elevators in residential towers? And if so, at what height threshold?
I think the case is strong for buildings over fifteen stories. Below that, stairs and standard elevators are annoying but manageable. Above fifteen stories, you're in a zone where the stair option becomes unreasonable for anything heavy, and the elevator becomes the only viable path. At thirty stories and above, I'd argue you need dual service elevators — not just one. The scheduling math we did earlier breaks down completely if you've got a hundred twenty units and one service elevator. You need redundancy.
The cost argument — one to two percent of construction cost — seems almost trivial when you factor in the rent premium and the resident satisfaction.
It does, but I want to steelman the developer's position for a second, because it's not pure greed. Every square meter you allocate to an elevator shaft is a square meter you can't sell or rent. In a forty-story tower, a freight elevator shaft might consume thirty to forty square meters per floor when you include the lobby and mechanical space. Across forty floors, that's twelve hundred to sixteen hundred square meters — call it thirteen thousand to seventeen thousand square feet. In a city like Jerusalem, where residential real estate goes for thirty to forty thousand shekels per square meter in prime areas, that's a lot of foregone revenue.
The developer isn't just spending money on the elevator — they're losing saleable area.
And that's the real trade-off. It's not two hundred thousand dollars for the elevator hardware. It's the hardware plus the opportunity cost of the shaft space. That said, buildings with service elevators tend to have higher-value units on higher floors precisely because people will pay more for the convenience. The JLL study I mentioned found the premium holds. So it's not a pure loss — it's an investment that pays back through higher rents and faster lease-ups.
Which suggests the market should solve this on its own eventually. Developers who include service elevators will outcompete those who don't.
In practice, the housing market is so supply-constrained in most major cities that developers don't need to compete on move-in experience. They compete on location, price per square meter, and finishes. The moving logistics are a hidden cost that the buyer or renter doesn't discover until after they've signed. That's a classic information asymmetry, and it's exactly the kind of thing building codes exist to correct.
The mandate makes sense because the market can't price what the buyer can't see.
That's the argument in a nutshell. And we've seen this pattern before. Fire escapes, minimum ceiling heights, electrical standards — all things that developers resisted as unnecessary costs until they became code requirements, and now nobody would buy an apartment without them. Service elevators might be in that same category fifty years from now. People will look back at forty-story towers with a single tiny passenger elevator and wonder what we were thinking.
"They carried couches up thirty flights of stairs and called it normal.
Civilization is just a series of things we used to tolerate. Alright, let me give you one more angle that I think is underexplored. We've been talking about moving in, but there's also the question of ongoing deliveries. In a forty-story tower with two hundred units, you might have fifty to a hundred deliveries a day — packages, groceries, furniture, appliances. If the service elevator is also handling moves, maintenance workers, and residents with bikes or strollers, the contention gets intense. Some buildings are experimenting with dedicated delivery elevators that are separate from both passenger and service elevators, accessed by delivery drivers with a one-time code.
That feels like the logical endpoint. Three elevator systems: passenger, service, delivery. At that point, you've got a vertical logistics network that looks more like a warehouse than a residential building.
That's not a bug — it's a feature. High-rise living is fundamentally a logistics problem. You're stacking hundreds of households vertically and expecting them to function as smoothly as if they were on ground level. The elevator is the supply chain. If the supply chain breaks, everything else breaks.
Where does that leave us? If you're moving into a high-rise tomorrow, what can you actually do?
First, demand a move-in plan before you sign anything. Ask specific questions: Is there a service elevator? What are its exact dimensions? Are there move-in time restrictions? Can you reserve the elevator in advance? If the landlord or developer can't answer those questions, that's a red flag. Second, get a moving quote that accounts for the floor number and elevator dimensions. Don't just tell the moving company you're on the twentieth floor — tell them the elevator interior is a meter forty by a meter ten, and let them price accordingly. Third, if you're looking at new construction, ask about the service elevator during the tour. Make it a thing. The more buyers and renters ask about it, the more developers will include it.
For policymakers listening — because I know they're tuning in to a podcast hosted by a sloth and a donkey — the fifteen-story threshold seems like the place to start. Mandate service elevators above fifteen stories, dual service elevators above thirty. The cost is manageable, the benefit is real, and the alternative is a future where moving into a high-rise is a luxury experience for the stuff and a nightmare for the people.
I'd also add: for developers, invest in move-in infrastructure as a selling point. The Dubai data shows it pays off. Market the freight elevator. Put it in the brochure. Call it something appealing — I don't know, "Resident Logistics Suite." Make it sound premium.
"Your furniture's journey begins here.
You know what, I'd tour that building just to see the elevator.
Here's my open question, and I don't know the answer. As cities keep densifying and towers keep getting taller — forty stories, fifty stories, sixty — does the move-in bottleneck eventually become a hard constraint on high-rise construction? Not a cost problem, not an inconvenience, but an actual physical limit. At what height does moving your belongings into an apartment become so logistically complex that people simply refuse to do it?
I think we're already seeing the early signals. In some of the supertall residential towers in Dubai and New York — we're talking eighty, ninety stories — the buildings have dedicated move-in coordinators on staff. It's not optional. The logistics are so complex that you need a full-time employee just to schedule and manage moves. That's not a residential amenity anymore — that's a building system, like plumbing or electrical. And I suspect that as towers get taller, we'll see more of that. The move-in coordinator becomes as standard as the building superintendent.
The concierge of vertical migration.
Maybe that's the future. Not just bigger elevators, but a whole professionalized layer of move-in logistics that we currently treat as an afterthought. Autonomous delivery robots in the lobby that take your boxes from the loading dock to your floor. Drone-accessible balconies for small-item delivery. Modular furniture designed for disassembly and elevator transit. Dedicated move-in chutes. And yes, properly-sized service elevators as the backbone of the whole system.
The humble elevator, which we all ignore until it's broken or too small, is actually the gatekeeper of whether high-rise living works at all. And right now, in too many buildings, the gatekeeper is a hundred-ninety-two by sixty-two centimeters of pure spite.
Pure spite with brushed steel doors.
If you've got a move-in horror story — and I know you do, because everyone who's ever moved into an apartment above the third floor has one — send it to us. We might feature it in a future episode. And if you're a developer listening to this and you're currently planning a forty-story tower with a single passenger elevator the size of a phone booth, reconsider your choices.
Your future residents will thank you. Or at least they won't curse your name while carrying a dresser up twenty flights of stairs.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In sixteen ninety-seven, the Russian explorer Vladimir Atlasov documented that the Itelmen people of Kamchatka described the movements of bees using a system of drawn symbols meant to mirror the insects' waggle dances, but his translator misunderstood and recorded it as a form of regional handwriting. The manuscript sat in a St. Petersburg archive for over three hundred years before a linguist realized the symbols were not letters at all, but a diagram of bee communication.
The world's first bee choreography notation was filed under "illegible penmanship" for three centuries.
That feels about right for the history of science.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop, our producer, for that fact and for keeping this whole operation running. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back with another one soon.
