Accessible housing issues

[ijmorlan]

The AODA (among other recent legislative changes) has made important steps towards removing the segregation of disabled people in our community.
With respect to accessible parking spots, they are generally larger than regular parking spot for ease of loading and may also be near a ramp to a sidewalk.

With respect to not having all new buildings with elevators, we are confining the physically disabled to ground floor interactions.  They will be unable to visit friends or relatives on other floors.  This also includes those with declining mobility.  With the growing trend towards encouraging aging-in-place, forcing someone to move simply because their building is not accessible goes against that practice.  If someone has been living in second, third or fourth story of a small apartment building for a number of years (or decades), forcing them to move if they now need a walker or wheelchair puts undue hardship on them.

PS. Likely related to this current diversion, the ad showing on this page is for Home Stairlifts of Woodbridge, ON. "June is Seniors Month...All New Straight Stairlifts $3100"

That’s nice and all, but small apartment buildings with 2 apartments on each floor are an important middle ground between detached homes and larger apartment buildings. What’s better, an empty lot or an 4-story, 8-unit cheap apartment with no elevator?

I agree it would be weird to build a large building with a dozen or more apartments on each floor and not include an elevator, but to make smaller affordable buildings illegal is unreasonable. In a time when affordable housing is in short supply, we need to allow affordable housing to be built, not make some forms of it illegal.

If we took your point to its logical conclusion, we would require every house, including single detached houses, to have an elevator, so that its hypothetical future occupants wouldn’t have to move on account of mobility restrictions. I hope it’s clear that this is entirely infeasible. Actually even that isn’t the ultimate conclusion; we could imagine requiring every house to include nursing home care for when its occupants need it. People need to choose their housing based on their needs and resources; as circumstances change, sometimes they need to move. This is just how things are, not some discrimination imposed by an intolerant human society. The only question is where to draw the line between small buildings that don’t necessarily have elevators and large ones which must.

If you really want to improve accessiblity, require the ground floor of every new dwelling to be accessible from outside (sometimes called “visitable” design). It’s still very common to have 2-6 steps up from the ground to the entrance door. One might initially assume the reason is related to the existing terrain, but when one considers the amount of earthmoving that is done in a new subdivision it becomes clear that the existing terrain is irrelevant; they change the topography to whatever they want.

As to the accessible parking spots, the whole point is that the most accessible spots in a typical townhouse complex are the ones that belong to the individual units, not the designated spots in the visitor section. This is a different context from a large retail store where it makes a lot of sense to reserve spots near the door for people with limited mobility. Different context, different solution.