Operating Permits Expired in Thousands of Bay Area Elevators

Saturday morning at my apartment building began with a woman screaming from the bottom of an elevator shaft. The tenant was trapped in an elevator car, between the basement and ground floors. She rang the distress bell again and again. Nobody seemed to notice. Then someone did. It took almost ten minutes to extract the panicked passenger from the malfunctioning car. Later, while carting my laundry to the basement in my 11-story building’s last working elevator, I hoped I wasn’t next. 

This is not an uplifting story. That’s the point: renters like my neighbors and I are trapped on the ground floor in a bureaucratic tower of bullshit. One systems engineer calculated that as of May 2025, California was operating 66,933 elevators with expired permits. Apparently there are over 7,500 just in San Francisco. In 2022, that figure was closer to 9,000. It’s not like these elevators are unilaterally unsafe. However, minor problems have had ample time to grow into bigger ones. Without routine inspection, we can’t know which elevators are harboring them—until somebody gets hurt. 

One day in 2008, elevator doors parted for Bay Area resident Andrew Michael, who stepped over the threshold into darkness. The car had stopped not on his floor, but one two stories down. His wife watched helplessly as the elevator shaft swallowed her husband’s body. He didn’t respond to her screams. The impact knocked him unconscious. (NBC Bay Area)

Michael survived with multiple broken bones and a traumatic brain injury. The lawsuit he and his wife filed asserts the accident was caused by mechanical issues. An expired permit did not play a part—this time. The incident however sparked concerns about the region’s abundant elevators currently in service around San Francisco and beyond. 

“The California Department of Industrial Relations says it is revamping its database,” claims the fourteen-year-old article. “The department says the new database will give advance notifications of permits that will soon expire. It hopes to have the database up and running by the end of the year.” 

In 2014, Mayor Ed Lee pledged “critical…short term” repairs for SF’s beleaguered elevator stock. Clementina Towers resident Kevin Lee was counting on them. The lifts in his building reportedly break once or twice a month, leaving them out of service more often than in. Lee was skeptical of then-Mayor Ed Lee’s promise of swift and sweeping repairs. “We keep asking, and they keep saying the same thing: ‘It’s coming soon, it’s coming soon, it’s coming soon.’” (SF Examiner)

Cut to 2022 and the problem is more pervasive than ever. “Joel Rodriguez and his girlfriend were in a group of nearly ten people who got stuck on an elevator at the Masonic on California Street after a concert in February of this year.” (ABC7, May 2022) The day before, a woman got trapped in an elevator at Hotel Zeppelin for over an hour. 

Saturday morning’s elevator incident was not the first at my address. Somebody else got stuck in an elevator this time last month, and again the month before. I, for one, don’t like those odds. The guilty elevator, reportedly “fixed” not yet a week ago, was out of service most of September. Both elevators were down for several days at one point, imprisoning my building’s many senior and disabled residents at home. At 35, I can still hack a ten-flight climb. But if I’m having a hard time by floor 7, imagine you’re an 80-year-old woman with COPD living above me. Adding insult to injury, as the elevator service here gets worse, the rent continues to climb. 

The alloy plaque meant to bear the elevator’s operating permit has been conspicuously blank for a few years now. Rumor has it the permit’s glaring expiration date accrued too many complaints. Out of sight, out of mind—right? My building’s elevator permits expired in 2019. In 2020, I asked the on-site manager if there were plans to have the pair of old cable-driven lifts inspected. That’s when I learned about the loophole. 

In California, if your elevator operating permit expires, applying for renewal is all it takes to avoid most legal repercussions. The State has exponentially more renewal applications than qualified inspectors to approve them. “Even if a building owner schedules an inspection before the permit expires, it can still take months to get that inspection done,” wrote NBC’s Liza Meak in a piece on this very subject in 2011. Back then, just 26 licensed elevator inspectors were working in the Bay Area. Meak also found that each inspector can perform up to five inspections per business day. “That's 26 inspectors for roughly 32,000 elevators across the Bay Area.” By 2022, the number of inspectors had dwindled to merely thirteen. 

If the source of the problem is a dearth of engineers. Even the universities which produce them are suffering. In 2024, 260 of the 274 elevators on the Stanford University campus—94%—didn’t have current operating permits. Several students reported inoperable buttons, getting stuck, and a heart-stopping two-story drop. Found at every campus elevator in question: an expired permit.

I see this quietly worsening crisis as belonging to a nationwide pattern of infrastructural failures. From increasingly well-known bridge deficiencies to supertall skyscrapers sloughing off chunks of concrete, I can’t help feeling this is symptomatic. Whatever barriers exist between training or hiring tradespeople for these positions need to be dynamited straight away. Public safety hangs in the balance.

The shortage of state-qualified elevator inspectors is inexplicable as it is inexcusable. How is it that our cities stay standing at all? That’s just it, I realized: it is falling apart, one piece at a time. In 2025, elevators throughout the Bay Area continue operating legally well beyond the expiration date on their permits. It appears property owners are free to run their elevators until they break down and fill with water neck-deep. Who cares about the people trapped inside if they can’t sue because of a technicality? It would seem lives matter less than liability.