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Coin-Operated Elevators in Condominiums and Apartment Buildings Are Becoming More Common
(www.gadgetreview.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Yeah, let's charge people for every little bit of the building you in particular don't use. Fuck it, coin operated fire suppression systems because Wispy2891 doesn't want to pay for the maintenance in a building he or she lives in.
So wait, do you also have to pay for building repairs, maintenance, every time roof or pipes need to be replaced, etc.? Where I live, people just pay rent and landlords use that money to maintain the building instead of charging for things like bulbs in stairway or an elevator in building seperately
I don't know Wispys situation in particular, but in a lot of condos (apartments that people own), on top of a mortgage there is often a maintenance fee that goes directly to a special account for building repairs or maintenance. Then for emergencies there might be additional "special assessments" to cover unexpected expenses. If those are not paid they can exert pressure through a lien on the property or other means. Most often owners will be able to see exactly what the maintenance fee covers. This helps keep the process transparent. So you know $20 of each fee goes to monthly landscaping or whatever so you can do the math to make sure there's no fraud. If there's 100 units and you're each spending $3000 a month to have someone take care of a small garden bed then you know someone is doing something fishy. So I imagine they received a breakdown of their fees that included how much it cost to keep the elevator running.
Well at the fifth floor there's an asshole that's renting the whole floor on Airbnb and I'm contributing to that, with all the up and down traffic of tourists. Would you be happy? Before the Airbnb I spent way less than that
The coin was just a token, 100 lire (0.05€ + 50 years of inflation, let's say 50 cents). It doesn't cover maintenance but it avoids assholes repurposing a residential apartment as hotels. And it had a key to bypass it (example: wheelchairs and such)
Sounds like your neighbor is the problem, not the elevator.
Add it to their rent if they’re subletting, don’t penalize your other tenants
This is why landlords should be abolished, this mindset
Usually the maintenance fee is added to everyone, based on the square meters of the apartment, or just flat fee per apartment. It likely would be illegal to specifically make one apartment's fees significantly higher and also that apartment's owner would never vote for it. Especially if that person owns an entire floor worth of apartments, as they get multiple votes.
What was described was quite literally the best way to punish the super heavy top floor AirBNB users over the people who actually live there. And those people who don't use the elevator don't have to pay at all, instead of subsidizing all the AirBnB users on the 5th floor. But since the coin system isn't in use anymore, Wispy has to pay 200€ a year for other people to take the elevator.
At the end of the day, stuff like this is voted for by the apartment owners and it's up to them how they distribute the costs, by usage or same for everyone.