Only the heartless would not feel sympathy for what Eleanor Smith has endured while spending 56 of her 59 years in a wheelchair. As a child playing with friends in a neighbor’s yard, she’d be left there if the kids got a notion to run inside. Smith couldn’t make it up the steps. As an adult in an apartment, she had to crawl to get into the bathroom.
“The level of what happens to you when you can’t get into a bathroom is primitive,” Smith told Tribune reporter Karen Mellen. “Inconvenience is much too mild a word for not fitting through a bathroom door.”
Led in part by Smith, a founding member of an advocacy group for the disabled, some communities are looking at innovative ways to expand “visitability,” the concept of making all homes handicapped accessible on the first floor.
The Naperville City Council voted 7-1 last week to require that all new homes in the city include reinforced bathroom walls for handrails, wider doors on the first floor and lower electrical outlets and light switches that can be reached by individuals in wheelchairs.
The council decided to hold off voting on a more costly and controversial proposal to require one entrance to be accessible without steps.
Naperville’s requirements are modest. The measures would add an estimated $300 to the price of a home. A step-free entrance requirement, however, would hike the price of a new home by as much as $5,000. And with all the good intentions in Naperville, that would run smack against another good intention–providing affordable housing in the suburbs.
Officials in Naperville, and other towns that might consider emulating this, can’t let good intentions blind them to the kind of cost-benefit analysis they should make every time they’re imposing a requirement on their residents.
About three-quarters of 1 percent of Americans use wheelchairs, according to statistics from Disability Rights Advocates, an international non-profit group based in Oakland, Calif. Almost 3 percent of Americans use wheelchairs, canes, crutches or walkers.
If someone wants to build a private home that is “visitable” for the disabled, bless their bricks and mortar. If they don’t, that should be their decision. This is not an issue of public safety. We’re talking about private homes, not public accommodations.
There are non-coercive ways to accomplish “visitability.” Bolingbrook recommends, but stops short of requiring, a no-step entrance, wider doorways and roomier first-floor bathrooms. Chicago requires that 20 percent of new homes subsidized by the city Housing Department must be handicapped accessible. Austin, Texas, requires all publicly funded homes to be “visitable” and offers financial incentives for builders who would use those features in their homes.
As arthritis exacts its pain on increasing numbers of Baby Boomers, and more joggers’ hips and knees get replaced, “visitable” homes very likely will be in demand. Savvy builders already are marketing those features, but they shouldn’t be required by law.
