If you are riding an elevator in an older building in Vancouver, it is pretty common to see the numbers skip floors. The 12th floor suddenly jumps to the 14th, like you’ve magically transported between time and space, leaping over the 13th.
It’s not just Vancouver; many buildings in North America have this strange and superstitious feature. According to the world’s leader in elevator manufacturing, Otis Worldwide, about 85% of their elevator panels don’t even have a 13th-floor button.
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The fear of the number 13 is so prominent in Western cultures that many people admit they would request to stay on any other hotel floor because of it or avoid living in a home with the number in the address due to its apparent unluckiness.
Friday the 13th is famously associated with a rise in hospital visits, although researchers have disproven this claim. Plus, some airports in the US don’t have a 13th gate over flying fears.
So why is 13 such a negative number?
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“The number 13 may be associated with some famous but undesirable dinner guests. In Norse mythology, the god Loki was 13th to arrive at a feast in Valhalla, where he tricked another attendee into killing the god Baldur. In Christianity, Judas — the apostle who betrayed Jesus — was the 13th guest at the Last Supper,” University of South Carolina professor emeritus of sociology Barry Markovsky wrote online.
Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code popularized the theory that the day is considered unlucky because members of the Knights Templar were arrested on that day in the 14th century.
However, historians say this is a myth as the number wasn’t considered unlucky until the 20th century, following the release of Thomas William Lawson’s 1907 novel Friday, the Thirteenth.
Regardless of its origins, some have called the whole thing a bit silly.
“I’m staying in a hotel right now, and there’s no 13th floor because of superstition. Come on, man. People on the 14th floor, you know what floor you’re really on,” comedian Mitch Hedberg quipped back in the day.
It wasn’t just the number 13 either; lots of numbers are avoided, like the number 4, which sounds like the word for death in Cantonese and Mandarin. Some other East Asian cultures are also fearful of the number 4, known as tetraphobia.
This means a building might not only skip 13 but 4, 14, and 24; you can see where we are going here.
Vancouver leads the way
Vancouver City Hall (Shawn.ccf/Shutterstock)
But in Vancouver, it will one day be a rarity to see. Vancouver made the move nearly 10 years ago to stop allowing floor skipping as it was becoming a huge safety issue, according to Saul Schwebs, the City of Vancouver’s chief building official and director of building policy, inspections, and bylaw services.
He said it was becoming more and more of a concern, especially as buildings were being built taller and taller.
“If there was just one or two floors being skipped in the building, that didn’t provide much of an issue. But now we’ve realized we have 80-story buildings that only have 68 floors in them, which was causing all kinds of confusion, not only for people visiting the building and wayfinding but also for first responders,” Schwebs explained.
“They are counting from the outside, but firefighters from the inside are looking at the floor numbers as they go up the stairs,” he said. “It was getting really confusing.”
Schwebs said a bulletin was issued in 2015 on the bylaw to clarify the building rules, and when checking the application for new builds going forward, a missing floor would result in a notice, and the developers would have to correct it.
The fortune of fear
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However, that wasn’t the only issue with unlucky number aversion. People were skipping numbers on their houses, suite numbers, and more to avoid the so-called bad luck.
BC researchers discovered that skipping floors and changing addressees to avoid these so-called unlucky numbers actually made a lot of sense from a financial standpoint. In a 2012 study, they found that a house with a 4 in the address had a slight dip in price compared to one with the number 8 in it, which is considered a lucky number in Chinese culture.
“We find that, on average, in neighbourhoods where the percentage of Chinese residents exceeds the Greater Vancouver average of 18%, houses with address numbers ending in ‘4’ are sold at a 2.2% discount and those ending in ‘8’ are sold with a 2.5% premium in comparison to houses with address numbers ending in any other digits,” Nicole M. Fortin, Andrew J. Hill, and Jeff Huang’s paper cited in part.
Adding that even the number “4” in elevators has been cited as a potential link between price effects of culturally driven beliefs; however, it added that it’s more anecdotal evidence in that case.
Another bulletin in 2022 further clarified that the suite numbers and home addresses also had to be sequential.
Safety first
Fire breaks out in Vancouver on October 21, 2024. (Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services/X)
While realtors might be frustrated, it’s unlikely they would be able to argue with the city against it.
“The goal with the sequential floor numbers and sequential suite numbers is life safety. It’s making sure that firefighters aren’t delayed in their response because that response time is critical in terms of saving people and saving buildings. Somebody would have to make a hardship [case] that says ‘to sell this unit, and it’s more important than the safety of people in the building.’”
He hasn’t had any conversations with developers about that, and he hasn’t seen any complaints brought forward, either. But that’s not to say that those in the construction industry aren’t being creative when it comes to the rules.
“People [are] being awfully clever about how they apply [the rules.] We’re seeing, depending on how they number, a high-rise condominium tower with townhouses at the base, they might number those townhouses the other floors of townhouses, such that it impacts somehow those sequential floors of the tower,” he said.
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Or they use the unlucky floors for things like storage or mechanical rooms as a part of the design, and therefore, there’s no actual human occupation on those floors, but they still exist, and therefore, it’s not a safety concern.
If you just moved into a new build and you are still seeing numbers missing on the elevator, they might not necessarily be breaking the rules. Legacy projects, aka projects that have been in development for a decade, would not be forced to comply with the rules.
He explained that the rules don’t apply retroactively.
“We have certain upgrade requirements in the Vancouver building bylaw, where, if they were to do a significant renovation to a building, there are certain elements that they would have to upgrade, seismic resilience, accessibility, energy efficiency and fire and life safety,” he said.
“It could be that if the scope of work is significant enough that there are fire and life safety requirements needed, that may be an opportunity for the City to say, ‘as long as we’re at it, please number your floors sequentially.’”
However, following the release of the newest BC Building update, staff are working on regulations for consideration by the Council for adoption as a new Building By-law for 2025 and inviting all public feedback on issues such as skipping floors to other matters such as sprinklers and fire escapes to share their concerns. To learn more, go to the website.