Otis (the elevator), my man!

Otis (the elevator), my man!

Before today’s current information age, what would you say is the most important invention/creation of mankind?  Fire?  The wheel?  The printing press?  Electricity?  The car?  All good choices.  I am not sure there is a correct answer.  However, I offer up for your consideration a lesser thought of invention that I believe is equally important to the world as we know it today.  The elevator.  You may be asking yourself why the elevator, and how does it tie to the general real estate development blogs that I am known for internationally.  (Really.  My Google stats show I am read internationally.  Go figure.) 

Let’s take a step back and review development patterns.  More than anything else, people need to live within proximity of work.  That used to mean that population centers needed to be clustered within easy access to central business districts.  Then, with the growth of the automobile, suburban sprawl occurred, allowing for office parks and corresponding housing developments to be spread out in previously more desolate area.

However, the ability to densely pack commercial and office real estate is what drives the need and desire for more people to live in concentrated areas.  Now, real estate is a fairly finite commodity.  However, air rights are a bit more flexible and elastic in their usability.  Hence, the elevator.  Without the elevator, you would never have major metropolises with millions of square feet of office and commercial space, and the corresponding millions, and in some cases tens of millions, of residents.  Instead, you would be limited to a landscape of three and four story walkup buildings at best.

OK.  Now that I have made my point, so what?  Well, let’s agree that commercial development is a major driving factor in residential housing patterns.  You can even prove it by looking back to the middle ages.  Everyone lived around the castle.  The castle offered protection and all farming was done to serve the king in the castle.  Hence, you lived around the castle.  At that time, the castle was the macdaddy commercial building of the area.  Now, the skyscraper, courtesy of the elevator, is the driving force behind how we live.  We need to live close to work and the elevator allows for an awful lot of office space in one location. 

Let’s fast forward a bit now.  With the advent of social media, do we truly need office buildings?  We can conduct face to face conferences by video, even by using our cell phones.  We can send large documents through e-mail, as opposed to either snail mail or overnight delivery.  We can even scan and download documents instead of needing storage files for hard copy documents.  So, how long will it be before we render the elevator unnecessary by no longer having the need for commercial office space?

Everything evolves, and this evolution affects everything around us.  (What a great transition to housing.)  Think about what growth in social media will do to your housing of the future.  We traditionally think we will live in our homes forever and that our homes will service all of our needs.  However, indoor plumbing did away with the need for outhouses.  Garages became necessary with the popularity of the automobile.  Parlors have given way to living rooms which have, in turn, given way to great rooms.  Entertainment centers have morphed into wall mounted televisions and home phones are becoming irrelevant on a daily basis.  Think about how long it may be before a remote office space is unnecessary.  Will home office spaces or flex spaces become the norm in home design?  Or will the continued evolution of social media completely change office work habits to the point where housing needs change in ways that we cannot even begin to fathom today.  Will the housing of today be perceived in the same nostalgic way we view housing from centuries past?  Who knows?  The only thing we do know is that the world constantly evolves and that today’s world is changing faster than ever. 

In the future, as our grandchildren find themselves lounging in their new homes that have construction methods and functionalities that we cannot even begin to contemplate today, it may not be surprising to see them sharing old tales of their childhoods with their own grandchildren and explaining how fun it used to be to visit their parents at work by riding up to see them in an elevator from the turn of the millennia.  The children, though, may not be listening.  They may be playing with their new state of the art social media devices.

Until next time…

Keep kicking the dirt!