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| Knee room under all surfaces... |
Louis Shalako
What would an accessible dwelling look like.
What if a person were in a wheelchair, what if they
were blind, what if they were deaf.
What if they were just small and frail.
Where I live, it is a three-floor walk-up. Only the
ground floor is accessible to a wheelchair user, and only from the back parking
lot. A person in a wheelchair could enter the building through the back door,
which appears to be wide enough. Individual units, on the ground floor, have
relatively wide doors from the hallway. Once you’re in the door, it is a
slightly different story.
My own apartment entrance has a little strip to keep
out drafts. One side is the carpet of the hallway, and one side is the tile in
the apartment. It’s a half an inch high, across the doorway, and one would hope
that someone in a wheelchair could surmount this little hurdle, and actually
get into their apartment and maybe even close the door behind them.
***
My friend Jerry was deaf. He was able-bodied, he was
able to work. He could afford an apartment, the only trouble was, he could not
hear…he had a special set-up, and this was back in the 1990s. When the phone
rang, a naked light bulb in a small table lamp, set beside the television,
would light up. The doorbell was rigged the same way, or friends and family never
would have gotten in without a key.
When the landline phone rang, Jerry picked it up and
put it in a cradle. He hit a switch.
He pulled a keyboard over, and used the remote to
change the channel on the TV. Since he could not hear, a ‘scrambler’ sort of
thingy turned the words into text that he could see on screen, and so could I,
sitting there in the living room. I watched
as he talked to his mother on the phone…
Jerry was quick on the keyboard, although the spelling
wasn’t so good. Deaf people have one hell of a time getting any kind of
education, and that is just the truth…the black box beside the television did
one other thing, it put closed captions on every show, every channel, the code
embedded in the signal right from the broadcaster.
This was a big thing at the time—
Jerry spoke fairly
well, although a lot of people just assumed he was ‘retarded.’ Deaf people get
no audio feedback—they can’t hear themselves talk, and this affects their
pronunciation. Jerry did not have an inside
voice, or an outside voice. He had
one voice for all circumstances. Jerry owned a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and
he rode it to work in the summer months. He was unusual, for the Harley owner.
Jerry didn’t pull the baffles from the exhaust system to make it louder. What would
have been the point. He was never going to hear it anyways, but as for
accessibility, his apartment really didn’t require a lot of expensive
modifications, and what little help he needed came from some sort of government
program for the deaf. Which is terribly nice of the government, and the
taxpayers, when you think about it. A lot of it comes from charitable donations
to foundations for the deaf and all of that sort of thing. We have
traditionally underfunded all such programs, and you don’t mess lightly with
people’s traditions…
***
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| Jerry was deaf, but he could at least keep a job. |
In my science-fiction story, The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue, Mister Scott Nettles is blind.
When I was engaged in writing the book, I turned off all the lights, I closed
all the curtains. When I closed the bathroom door, it was pretty dark in there,
and I had to wonder how a person maneuvers their way around without vision. The
fears of falling in the shower, or tripping over the cat—this is why Scott,
lonely as he is, doesn’t have one—I suppose we can all empathize with the
challenges of daily life, for surely we all have them in our own degree. A
blind person might have a big problem with a simple touch-screen, which the
rest of us take for granted.
I wondered how a person finds their way around town,
how do they shop, how do they find anything in the cupboards. Scott lives in a
major city on the eastern seaboard of the United States, in a
slightly-dystopian future, and one wonders just how people do it sometimes…
If you want to try the experiment, wait until
nightfall, put on a pair of cheap sunglasses, and feel around in the cupboards
for the spare bottle of ketchup. Bend over in complete darkness and rummage
around in the bottom of the fridge for a couple of carrots, and then the kitchen
drawer to find the vegetable peeler. What would it be like to cook your dinner
in complete darkness.
A story really ought to have a point, it makes it so
much more interesting for the listener. That is right out of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, with
Steve Martin and John Candy.
The point is, is that there is a difference between
supportive housing, which all the ineffectual do-gooders are talking about
these days, and accessible housing,
which also includes the ability to pay the rent. Supportive housing is where
the social workers knock on the door of your eight by twelve and remind you to
take your meds—or maybe to stop taking your other
meds…and it’s only another eighteen months before you get into rehab and while
we’re at it, can we slap a tourniquet on that terrible boiling abscess on your
face where you burned yourself toking meth off a bit of tinfoil and flaming
that with a high-end butane lighter…???
Oh, and how is that special ointment we gave you, and is
that helping to remove the stigma of mental health. We’d like to put that on
the front page of the newspaper. Do you have enough Nalaxone kits on hand?
‘Cause we give them out free, in a clump of bushes, down by the riverbank…
***
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| Hates his kitchen... |
My kitchen is small enough that I have come to hate
it. I bitch, and whine, and piss and moan something awful, problem is, I’m too broke for fast food and too lazy to
go to the soup kitchen. I just fucking hate it in there, but there’s no
alternative. There is no way in hell
that a person in a wheelchair could do very much of anything on their own. This
ignores the fact that this is a third-floor apartment. The bathroom, if
anything, is worse. Never mind bars and grips and handholds, there just isn’t
enough room to even get the chair into the room, let alone get out of it, and
onto the toilet or into the bath or shower.
Gut instinct says you’d have to triple the floor space
of the bathroom, at a minimum, that’s just for the chair, and more likely
quadruple the square footage of the kitchen. This at least allows a person to
turn the wheelchair around…otherwise, if you think about it, you either have to
back up and start again, or go out the other end, circle back around through
some other room, presumably, and come back in the door again. People would have
to be able to reach things, and bending myself in half to grab an onion out of
the bottom of the fridge doesn’t even get close to the physical challenges of
sitting in a chair, with armrests and a footrest, and reaching down or up or
just plain into, just about any
storage space.
Then there’s the whole boiling-water thing, and
cooking on a hot surface, or in an oven sort of challenge. This is where simple
clearance between the knees and the arms of the chair comes into play, and
there has to be an open space below pretty much anything, in order to even get
close. Rinsing the peanut butter off of a knife begins to take on a whole new
meaning.
The fridge or stove in this apartment, could not have
cost $500.00 when new. Appliances for the wheelchair user are far, far more
expensive. So is that additional square footage, whether it is additional to
the living unit, or whether something designed into a standard footprint has to
give something up somewhere else, is a question of decisions—everything has a
cost, one way or another.
We are asking a landlord or developer, to build in
some appreciable percentage of accessible housing units, in any proposed
development, or a major renovation of an existing housing unit. We’re asking
them to do it, because someone has to
do it.
***
In this building, the first floor is at ground level.
A similar building across the street, has the ground floor three feet down
below grade. Either way, it represents certain challenges. In this building,
the lobby is five feet above street level. The east end also has a porch. In
order to get in the front door, one has to navigate a sidewalk, five or six
steps up, a small porch, an outer door, and an inner door, and now you are in
the lobby. In order to get out of the lobby, you need to go either five feet
down, a few steps, (to the ‘ground’ floor), where there is another door, or up
one or two flights to the upper floors, each of which has its own door for fire
code compliance.
The best place to retrofit an elevator, is in the
lobby, which is two stories high. Above that is the one bachelor unit in this
building. The elevator would have to have a structure above the roof, in order
to install the hoisting gear. Having given up one unit in terms of income,
cutting holes and putting in supportive structures, the cost to make
above-ground units accessible is likely to be unattractive to for-profit
housing providers. That is not to say that it could not be done.
In a recent survey, twenty-seven percent of Canadians
identified as having some element of disability. We have to determine what
small percentage constitutes blind people, deaf people, people with mobility
issues, including wheelchair users, and then there is a whole spectrum of other
disabilities which presumably, don’t require so much physical adaptation in the
design of affordable housing units. At the far end of that spectrum would be
padded cells and bars and cages and all of that sort of thing…that’s a subject
for another day.
***
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| #screenshots |
A serious diabetic may not be able to earn a living,
without serious supports, and a person with Down’s syndrome may be ‘physically
able’, and still require supportive housing, without fitting into any other
stereotype or other negative categorization of a self-serving nature,
ultimately resulting in some sort of cop-out or other on the part of the
taxpayers, who will surely have to invest to some degree or face the
consequences, for example tent encampments in parks downtown…by folks you,
yourselves, cheerfully admit are kind of disabled by all this mental health and
addictions stuff all over the front page.
***
The balcony. In this building, the patio doors all
have a six-inch sill. On the ground floor, this keeps water out in high winds
and heavy rain. It also means that someone in a wheelchair would either need
one hell of a ramp inside, and the balcony is so small that a corresponding
ramp is impossible outside, or we have to remove the sills and put the patio
door right at deck level—in which case now we have the possibility of rain
coming in through the bottom of the door. In the case of fire, the hallways filled
with smoke, it might be nice to be able to get out onto the balcony, sit there
and wait for rescue.
It’s just one more thing, one more consideration, one
more design headache, all of which adds to cost, time and complexity, in any
project, whether it’s a new build or a ‘major renovation’. There is a solution,
one which requires some flexibility of thinking. What if, in units designated
‘accessible’, the patio or balcony door has a threshold that is as low as
possible, and in all other units, the developer can keep the high sill, in
order to address questions of wind and rain. It does take something away from
standardization, where every unit has the exact same door. Standardization is
not the be-all and end-all of good design. You have to give up one thing in
order to get another. It’s a compromise.
***
How in the hell does a guy in a wheelchair get into bed? Do they all order food for delivery, do they live on fast food and twelve-dollar delivery charges? You’d better have money, and a high-end phone with the ability to do that. You have to have the app, right.
Otherwise, you starve.
How do you convince a landlord or developer that there
will be sufficient demand, for space devoted to accessible units, and that the
tenants will be able to sustain those units, over any measurable period of
time, in order to get some return on investment, in a manner which will make
that investment worthwhile. When they move out, who moves in, or do you have to
renovate again?
This all applies to small bungalows, laneway suites,
garage conversions, and granny-type secondary housing units in residential
areas. They are either accessible, or
they are not.
If a person cannot earn
the income, where does the money come from? We find ourselves in the
predicament where we’re putting a million dollars of the taxpayers’ money into
an apartment, geared-to-income, with a forty-seven year waiting list, and the
tenant is paying one-third of their $733.00 welfare payment for the privilege
of having an accessible roof over their heads and still lining up at food
banks, soup kitchens, and this is what it costs to get them out of a tent down
in a park on the waterfront. This is what happens when folks, through no fault
of their own, are unable to maintain regular and renumerative employment, to
borrow a definition from the Ontario Disability Support Program.
If supportive housing is impossible enough, then
accessible housing is even more
impossibler.
END
Notes. The building across the street, where dozens of households were renovicted about June 1/23, is still deserted. I haven’t observed contractors on the site in quite some time. One wonders what’s going on there. Then there is the building on Earlscourt. There was a fire which damaged a unit, caused smoke damage in several others, and the owner evicted fifty something households due to ‘safety concerns’. One wonders if this ‘major renoviction’, where the owner is currently appealing a series of $35,000.00 fines, can show any evidence of conforming to Province of Ontario law regarding accessible housing.
Accessible bathrooms in new construction and major renovations: The next time we get a mass renoviction in this town, hit them with this: major renovations must include accessible bathrooms, accessible kitchens, storage, laundry and all other amenities in equal measure.
While pricing shall be commensurate, within
affordable guidelines, it will not be predatory or discriminatory.
How to design an accessible bathroom:
Accessible appliances as per the Americans with Disabilities Act:
Accessible housing, Wikipedia entry:
How much to put an elevator in a (new) three-story building:
Nowhere to Go: The Brenchley St. Renoviction, (Sarnia Journal).
Groundbreaking Fines for Locking Out Tenants, (Sarnia Observer).
Here is the free audiobook of The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles. (Wiki)
Thank you for reading.
