What is an Accessible Home. Analysis by Louis Shalako.

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…

***

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…

***

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.

***

#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.

***

This building was 'renovicted' and all tenants have been out since about the end of May last year. There has been sporadic and intermittent activity. We have not seen contractors here in some time...there are a few lights on in the building, and you can see refrigerators standing through the windows, pulled out from the wall but not disposed of or anything like that. One wonders what the game is...here's a thing. There is a shutdown going on at Suncor. Union members, who might very well moonlight in the off season and between jobs, would prefer to work the union job, for thirty to fifty dollars an hour, rather than twenty or twenty-five dollars an hour for some scab employer. There is a labour shortage by all accounts. There may have been cash-flow or financing problems. We simply don't know. Not too far away, there was a small fire, involving one or two units, and some smoke damage. That landlord is currently appealing fines of $35,000.00 per count, for unlawful practices in locking tenants out.

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.