Private homes are rarely accessible to people in wheelchairs. Jackie Simon, a real estate agent from Montgomery Village, Maryland, hopes to change that. “We still allow our single-family homes to be built with front porches and steps at every entry,” Simon lamented in the August 6 Washington Examiner. “If your neighbor is having a PTA meeting in her home and you [are] a wheelchair user, you can’t go to that meeting,”
Simon is part of the “Visitability” movement, which aims to eliminate barriers that make it difficult for disabled people to find housing and visit the homes of friends, family members, and neighbors. Concrete Change, an organization at the center of the movement, argues that all new homes should have three simple features: at least one entrance without stairs, a half bathroom on the main floor, and interior doors with 32 inches or more of clearance space.
You can read more about visitability on the group’s web site and in a pamphlet put together by the University of Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning. A few localities, including Pima County, Arizona, have adopted visitability requirements for new houses. But some have questioned mandating visitability. Click the following links to read about concerns raised by prominent New Urbanists and the National Association of Homebuilders.
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