In baseball the bench is the reserve a manager can send in, and Richard Joseph Spinelli borrows the word for something similar: the small, steady group of plumbers, electricians and other tradespeople sent to the same few blocks so often that they come to know each building. The word appears ten times in Student Housing Repairs Need a Small Bench of Trades and twice in each of four later Blogger pieces.
A bench forms, and then it has to be kept
The founding essay begins with a plumber who, walking into a fourth basement along a single street, already knows which of two shutoff valves actually works. Spinelli’s claim is that most of a repair visit goes to orientation, and that a tradesperson already familiar with the room from earlier visits skips that stage entirely. No one planned the arrangement, he says; it simply accumulated as call after call went to the same streets. Keeping it, he says, asks prompt payment, restraint about evening phone calls over problems that could keep, work sent in the quiet months, and requests precise enough that the right person brings the right part. He then names the cost. So few people amount to a reliance on each of them, and one retirement could take with it whatever they knew and nobody wrote down. That tension runs through knowledge lives in people and repetition builds familiarity.
The bench as a reference point
Later pieces use the word as shorthand. Student Housing Leasing Works Better as One Inventory calls its leasing advantage the earlier half of the same concentration that makes a bench possible. In Storm Response Is Simpler When Every Building Is Close, a morning loop after heavy rain settles by mid morning whether a wet cellar needs the bench or merely fans and a vacuum. A Walkable Portfolio Changes Who You Can Hire applies the same compounding to people on payroll. The tone turns warier in Building Maintenance History Belongs in Writing, where the bench’s store of undocumented history is quick while it lasts but lives in other people’s memories, and a written record becomes the portion the company can actually own.
The general picture
The labor market behind the term is tight. According to a 2025 release from the Associated General Contractors1, 92 percent of construction firms struggled to fill openings and 45 percent delayed at least one project for want of workers. A year earlier, Construction Dive reported2 that the industry still carried roughly 339,000 open jobs, with quits outnumbering layoffs, a sign that skilled workers keep changing employers. Replacements take years to train: federal projections for heating and cooling technicians3 show jobs growing 11 percent over the decade to 2035, and the federal outlook for electricians4 notes that most learn through a four or five year apprenticeship. A decade ago ACHR News relayed an industry forecast5 that nearly half of heating mechanics and installers would retire by 2025. Contractors describe the upside of repetition from their own side: heating firms interviewed by ACHR News6 prized twice yearly service agreements for the regular access they give technicians to the same homes and the lasting relationships that follow. Both findings fit his portrait of a bench as an asset that builds slowly and can vanish quickly. The broader history of in house building staff, supers included, sits in richardjspinelli.com’s article about New York superintendents, the main article.
Read in order, the Blogger essays gathered in the bench and the record travel from celebrating the bench to hedging against its disappearance, and the natural next reading after this entry is the September 21 case for writing a building’s history down.
