
Why Does Spain Have the World's Highest Concentration of Elevators? - curtis
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-does-spain-have-the-worlds-highest-concentration-of-elevators/381288/
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SeanLuke
The magazine says this is because so many Spaniards live in lots of apartment
buildings. But their graph shows that Spain has 19.8 elevators per 1000
people, while Hong Kong (!!) has only 10. Wait, what?

This smells like someone is forgetting a variable. In this case, it's probably
the density of elevators per occupant. I'm guessing that Spain has lots
buildings just barely too tall to be walk-ups. That's a much less snazzy
subheadline.

For those unfamiliar, here's a beautiful shot of Hong Kong.
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/HK_Kowloo...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/HK_Kowloon_Panorama_2009.jpg)

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darrhiggs
Yup, this is exactly correct. The buildings here in Valencia are 6-10 floors
on average.

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spikels
An elevator serving 50 stories should count more than one stopping at only 10
stories. A better measure would be total elevator stops but as usual you are
stuck with the available data - especially difficult to overcome with mult-
country data like this.

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candeira
The solution would be to count meters of elevator per person.

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jedberg
That's still not good enough because a tiny one person elevator shouldn't
count the same as a massive 30 person elevator.

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spikels
Hilarious! I have had similar discussions - just about different data source.

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jamesaguilar
I find it fascinating that despite not having the house+back yard that many
Americans strive for, the Spanish are happier with their housing situations
than we are.

As a recently minted homeowner myself, I must say I can see the attraction of
apartment living more than I could before. This house is a lot nicer and
bigger than our apartment was, but damned if I'm not having to replace the
sewer line, the patio, and various other things, despite having had
inspections beforehand. The less you own, the less there is to go wrong.

~~~
Swizec
> I find it fascinating that despite not having the house+back yard that many
> Americans strive for

As someone who spent the majority of their early childhood (ages 3 to 9) in
such a house, then lived in an apartment in a city (without an elevator on top
floor), I never understood why anyone would want a house.

What do you even do with that much space? I live in a very comfortable 52m^2
(560 ft^2) studio and I don't have enough stuff to fill even half the storage
space. Sure the kitchen is a bit small, and I guess the bathroom could be
slightly more comfortable, but you can solve those with a bigger apartment; a
house adds whole extra rooms.

Seriously, what do people do with that much room? Granted if you have a kid
and a spouse you'd want something more than a studio, but my mum's apartment
is about the same size as my studio and was a 2-bedroom. The three of us (mum,
sis, and me) lived there for 15 years together and we were perfectly fine.

Hell even when it was four of us (dad as well) and we lived in that giant
house, we only really lived on ground floor, which was essentially a 2-bedroom
apartment, and the attic and basement were pretty much empty and/or filled
with a bunch of junk.

From the best of my observation, houses are expensive, take up a lot of time,
and largely empty/useless.

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xrange
>I live in a very comfortable 52m^2 (560 ft^2) studio

I guess I've got you beat for efficient living then? I live with my wife and
our 4 kids in a 3030 sq. ft. home, which then works out to 505 sq. ft. per
person. Also it depends on where you live, but in some areas it is cheaper to
buy than rent, because you are just cutting out the middle man known as a
landlord. Or I guess you can think of yourself as your own landlord.

~~~
Swizec
Well, yes. Cohabitation is always more efficient than living on your own. And
the difference per head is essentially just 5m^2, I bet my balcony that's
almost useless takes up about that much.

And renting or buying, I would always go for an apartment. I just do not
understand houses. If I wanted more room, I'd go for a bigger apartment ...
like those fancy 2400+ft^2 two-storey apartments.

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hibikir
The article also forgets a lot of second order effects that affect much of
Spanish home ownership.

For instance, Franco's rental laws have been weakened, but not by that much.
Even when you could theoretically get evicted, a savvy lawyer can easily
extend a renter's stay at an apartment, without really paying a dime, for
about a year without facing eviction.

There's also pretty weak protections for renters whenever an apartment is
vandalized by its occupants. It is not uncommon to hear stories about tens of
thousands of euros of damage deal to apartments as retaliation to an eviction.

There's also rent controls that make San Francisco seem like a libertarian's
wet dream. The longer you hold an apartment, the less likely than you'll want
to leave, and the less profitable it is to the owner.

Such legal frameworks make apartment buildings that are built and designed for
renters, managed by a company, to be an exception rather than the rule.
There's just too much risk to take something like this on. So most rentals are
really by people that own 4, 5 apartments, and select the renter's very, very
carefully. For instance, my sister got a rather good deal a few years ago on a
little apartment for her and her husband, she was pregnant at the time. The
reason the price was so good was precisely that she offered an extremely low
risk for the owner: The apartment will get too small for my sister's family by
the time the kids stop being toddlers, she has great family references, and
her job requires her to have a good public reputation. So she is a very small
risk of staying there for very long, of damaging the apartment, and of
becoming delinquent. A recent college graduate born in a different state and
with a job would not be able to get the same deal, because of the different
risk profile.

Another part that it's not mentioned in the article is when your average
Spaniard stops living with his parents. Unlike in the US, when adolescents
move out of the house to go to college, many Spaniards will live with their
parents until they get married, and Spaniards don't marry young. This makes
the share of owned houses pretty high indeed, as living with mom does not
count as renting.

Spain's cities are extremely comfortable to live in, if you happen to have a
job, so I do not expect the number of elevators to change. Number of renters,
on the other hand, could be changed pretty quickly by legislation: Protecting
renters actually makes renting harder!

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spikels
Surprising the early populist housing policies of rivht-wing dictator Franco
were so similar to those of today's left-wing San Francisco government: rent
control, eviction restriction, etc. And the results were pretty much the same:
housing shortages, differed maintanence, etc. I guess they both overestimate
their ability to improve the situation. I wonder if SF will eventually learn
and change it's ways like Spain. The recent fairly reasonable AirBnB
regulation gives me some hope while the completely insane proposed 24%
transfer tax (Prop G) make me think it is hopeless.

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__Joker
I don't get it. No of apartment building correlates to no of elevators. Why it
should matter if the most owners live in their apartments or they rent it ?

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neito
I feel like there's a seam in this article. It starts talking about elevators,
then goes to apartments. While it's semi-natural to assume $NumElevators is
proportional to $numAptBuild, it strikes me as odd that a place that would
probably have a significant amount of old construction would have fewer
elevators, and older countries would have more old construction. As such, I
would more expect the situation to be like, say, Boston, with a lot of new
buildings that have nice elevators, and a lot of older, 4-6 story buildings
that are entirely walk-ups.

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reduce
"Homeownership Rates in Select European Countries" \-- That graph left out
some of the countries mentioned in previous graphs that actually have higher
home ownership rates :)

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velik_m
Yes this bothered me too, so i checked:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Europe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Europe),
with that kind of doctoring of data for the sake of the story, how can we
trust the rest of the data?

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ccozan
For Europe best is to look at Eurostat:

[http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....](http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/File:Population_by_tenure_status,_2012_%281%29_%28%25_of_population%29_YB14_II.png)

As you can see, Romania has the highest rate of homeownnership, and not Spain.

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barrkel
When I visited some smaller Spanish towns and villages, I was struck by how
abrupt the border between the town / village and the surrounding agricultural
land was. People would be living cheek by jowl, in terraced houses, with their
cars parked almost inside the houses, in alcoves built into the house, often
with a gate.

And this in the countryside, where one would think space would not be at a
premium. This article explains a lot.

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pjmlp
Although the focus of the article is about Spain, the same can be said about
Portugal, which went through a similar process during the same timeframe.

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frogpelt
Because some country has to.

Why not Spain?

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nbevans
Cheeky answer would be: Because they've got the UK and Germany paying for
them, just like the rest of their public infrastructure.

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deodorel
I would rather say that most euro countries are being ripped of by Germany, in
multiple ways like the beggar thy neighbor of internal devaluation, rigid
finacial policy when it suits them, way too higher trade imbalances with the
other euro area countries, etc ... but is way cooler to say that "they are
paying", because they are germans, right ...

