Accessibility Not an Amenity for Many Home Buyers

By Alan J. Heavens, Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/9/02

Eleanor Smith of Decatur, Ga., remembers what life was like after polio forced her into a wheelchair in 1947, at age 3.

"In my small town in Illinois, because there were no curb cuts, I would be going down the middle of the street with my little friend pushing me," she said. "If I wanted up, we went up a driveway and back into the street."

When she was older and wanted to go to the library, "there were at least 10 steps going up the front, and my friend had to come out carrying a stack of books from her chin down to her waist," Smith said, "and I would make my choices."

The supermarket was the only store Smith could enter. At every other store, "they had to bring things out to show me."

It's a different world today. Every new curb has a curb cut. It would be unthinkable for public buildings not to be accessible to everyone.

Yet most private housing remains inaccessible to people with physical disabilities. That's because the Americans With Disabilities Act, the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the Fair Housing Act deal more with multifamily buildings -- rentals, condominiums and townhouses -- than with single-family homes.

"Whenever I went to visit friends, I either was stopped at the front stairs [or] if there were no stairs, then the visit ended at the bathroom," Smith told a seminar at this year's International Builders Show in Atlanta.

So she decided to work for change. But Smith thought it necessary to look at the problem not from the perspective of housing for the disabled, "but just as housing."

She and others decided that such a change could be made more easily in new construction, but that for builders to accept change, "we had to keep the list short." A disabled Japanese architect with whom she discussed her ideas said the British already had a word for it -- "visitability" (and laws requiring it in houses built after 1998).

"Simply, it means having one no-step entry to the house -- in the front, the side or rear," said Mary Jo Peterson of Brookfield, Conn., a design consultant. "All interior doorways should be a minimum of 32 inches clear. And there should be a first-floor bathroom with such a doorway."

This does not mean a 32-inch-wide door. That would provide less than 30 inches of clear space -- not enough for a wheelchair to get through without scraping. To provide enough clear access, the door would have to be 36 inches wide.

Although Smith has used a wheelchair for most of her 59 years, her concern is also for those who find themselves in her situation at the end of an active life without any barriers.

"You become physically disabled, and you are no longer in the bridge club or serving on committees," Smith said. "It is life-changing."

Visitability is not a question of amenities. It means ensuring physical safety and avoiding the humiliation disabled people often endure when they cannot overcome physical barriers to do everyday tasks.

"People have lives, and, of course, it does matter if you can get through your own doors, but it also does matter if you can visit your child, or your grandchild, or your best friend," Smith said.

By 1992, she and her group, Concrete Change, were able to persuade the city of Atlanta to adopt an ordinance requiring that all new construction using federal and state funds have these visitability features.

The visitability ordinance in Austin, Texas, has two additional requirements involving placement of light switches and a 36-inch-wide level route through halls and passageways in single-family housing built with state funding.

A Texas law, effective in 1999, changed building codes to require such changes in all single-family affordable new construction. Georgia passed a similar law in 2000.

Puma County, Ariz., which includes the retirement destination of Tucson, adopted a comparable visitability ordinance in February, as did Urbana, Ill., south of Chicago.

Florida's "bathroom law," adopted in 1989, requires that single-family houses, duplexes, triplexes, condominiums and townhouses provide at least one bathroom on habitable grade levels, with a door that has a clear opening.

The National Association of Home Builders, through its Seniors Housing Council, is trying to get its membership to voluntarily incorporate visitability standards in new housing.

But, Peterson said, the issue can raise conflict because builders, already squeezed by high construction costs, don't want to take on more if buyers don't specifically request it.

She argued that visitability is an idea that includes everyone, even parents with strollers that need to be pulled up and down front stairs. "It integrates people of all shapes and sizes," Peterson said.

Visitability fits into the concept of universal design, behind which is a philosophy that takes two trends into account:

• That people 45 and older buying trade-up housing don't plan to move every seven years, which has long been the national average.

• And that as people age, they will progressively have trouble doing everyday tasks, such as reaching down to open a kitchen drawer, reaching up to get a book on the top shelf of the bookcase, or stepping over the raised base of a shower stall without having something to grab onto.

Universal design incorporates most of the ADA and Fair Housing Act design and accessibility guidelines because, over time, they allow a consumer to grow into a house. As with visitability, builder objections center on cost and consumer perception.

"Builders react to market," said Ed Phillips, president of the Georgia Association of Home Builders. "But when we are able to look past the issue of disability to one of the couple with twins who need to maneuver a stroller, or my bad knees, or my 82-year-old father coming to live with me someday, then the need for visitability becomes something affecting all of the market."

It is much less expensive to adapt new houses than existing ones to visitability standards. The California Foundation for Independent Living Centers said a zero-step entry for a new house costs $150, while wider interior doors cost $50.

"At $200, visitability amounts to about a third of the price of one bay window," the foundation said.

To retrofit older houses, conservative estimates of the cost of a zero-step entrance is $1,000, while widening an existing doorway is as much as $700, according to estimates supplied to the foundation by the NAHB.

Housing in older cities is at a definite disadvantage. "None of these houses are handicapped-accessible," said Christopher J. Artur, broker/owner of Artur Realty in Philadelphia's Mayfair section.

Artur said he sold a house a few years back to a woman with multiple sclerosis. One of the few that could meet her needs was a one-story bungalow rowhouse: "The house had no basement and no garage, and there were no steps from the street to the front door.

"Since none of these houses are handicapped-accessible, people are asking how they can be adapted to their needs," Artur said. "That question is going to be asked more and more as people here age."

Philips said that for many years, builders in Georgia, faced with calls for accessibility, "responded not just no, but `hell no.' "

"About three years ago, rather than `hell no,' we started saying, `We might be in favor of that if ...' instead," he said. "We decided that it was better to be part of the process, where we could get things done without having to drag it to the state Capitol."

Philips met Smith for the first time when she was part of a group blockading the builders' association office, holding a sign that read, "National Association of Hypocritical Builders."

The office became accessible shortly after.

"Incorporating visitability into residential construction is an opportunity to make a difference, but a profit as well," Peterson said. "And the profit is to be made by those who are there first."

Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune

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