Common ground found for urbanism and the disabled

“Lifelong Communities” charrette spurs a warming of relations between new urbanists and  disability-rights activists.

The Atlanta Regional Commission had Andres Duany lead a charrette in February aimed at helping municipal and county governments foster “Lifelong Communities” — places where people can comfortably live from childhood to old age.

The Commission, which promotes planning in the 10-county Atlanta region, is using the Lifelong Communities Initiative to produce policies, programs, and designs that will allow individuals and families to remain in a neighborhood as they age, even if their physical or mental abilities become impaired.

For Duany, the Miami architect, and for Eleanor Smith, the Atlanta-based founder of the disability rights organization Concrete Change, the charrette turned into an opportunity to forge agreement on at least some elements of a joint agenda. As a result of the discussions, Duany acted to “ensure that all mandates for elevated entries will be removed from the SmartCode,” said Scott Ball, charrette project manager for Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ).

“What I’m happy about is that there’s been a shift in the thinking,” Smith said at the conclusion of the week-long charrette. “The dialogue was really different — more cooperative and less antagonistic than in the past. So hopefully we’re at a turning point.”

Over the past several years, Concrete Change has criticized new urbanist house and apartment building designs that put entrances one or more steps above ground level — a height that makes porches more habitable and give interiors more privacy from the street, but at the expense of preventing wheelchair-bound people from entering.

Smith and others have advocated that except in unusual circumstances, each residential unit should have a “zero-step” entrance. If an at-grade entrance cannot be provided at the front door, Smith has said, a barrier-free side or rear entrance would generally be acceptable.
New urbanists have become more receptive to access for the disabled since the issue first flared up at a

Congress for New Urbanism annual conference in New York in 2001, but Smith says too many new urban developments continue to be built with barriers to people in wheelchairs. Calls for eliminating such barriers through laws and building codes have been resisted by new urbanists, in part because government enforcement tends to end up being excessively rigid.

“Every federal agency has a different way of saying what applies when,” Ball lamented. Federal codes are “byzantine and irrational,” he said, whereas what’s needed is guidance that is “rational and clear.”

Progress in Atlanta
The Lifelong Communities Initiative, supported by AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, argues that accessibility is becoming essential because the average lifespan is now 78 for men and 81 for women — much more than the 49-year US life expectancy in 1900. Individuals now live for many years with ailments and conditions that would have been fatal in an earlier era.

“The AARP,” Duany said, “is bouncing back from somewhat failed experiments,” such as senior housing, which is often set so far apart from the rest of the community that it generates isolation and inactivity. Older Americans increasingly say they prefer to continue living in places made up of people in a broad range of ages, and in walkable communities. Ball, citing research by Zimmerman/Volk Associates, said, “Baby boomers don’t like age-segregated, gated communities as much as an earlier generation did.” Duany told a charrette session, “You need to have neighborhoods again.”

He and the DPZ team brought together experts in health care, aging, mobility, transportation, accessibility, architecture, planning, and design. They explored how to make it possible for people to remain in their homes and communities for as long as they desire. The endeavor was based on the premise that it will be impossible to meet the needs of the growing older adult population with supportive programs or innovations in health care alone; what’s required is a rethinking of the way we plan for and regulate the built environment.

Among the charrette’s conclusions:
• Communities intended for lifelong occupancy must adhere to New Urbanism’s fundamental principles. Walkability, a mixture of uses, and a mix of building types should be seen as making neighborhoods more versatile and convenient.
• Accessibility standards should take into account not only the individual building (as in building codes) but also the walkability and accessibility of entire urban and suburban environments. Ball called the new objective “comprehensive environmental accessibility.” Kathryn Lawler, the Commission’s lead organizer for the charrette, reiterated that point, noting that walkable urbanism and the well-being of older people require attention to the whole scale and spectrum of the human habitat, “from the bathroom to the door handle, to the street, to getting on the bus, to getting downtown.”
• Accessibility to buildings should be maximized in places where pedestrian and transit accessibility is greatest. Lawler suggested that zoning policy could require a certain level of accessibility in all units, and mandate greater accessibility for units located near town centers and transit connections.
• Traditional building forms must be modified to reflect the fact that people are living longer, often with disabilities or chronic health problems. In Lifelong Communities, a zero-step entry should be provided for as many houses, apartments, and other buildings as possible. If new urbanist designs call for stoops, elevated porches, and other building elements that create barriers in front, especially careful attention must then be paid to side or rear entry alternatives.

The consensus of charrette participants was that over the past 40 years, federally mandated accessibility standards would have achieved greater results if they had been formulated within a zoning framework rather than relying solely on building codes.

Ball said that generally, communities should begin to conceive their accessibility goals broadly — as improvements in overall livability — rather than in terms of extracting specialized concessions from developers. This broader approach might include offering developers greater density, offsetting the burden of being required to make building modifications.

Smith continues to take a more aggressive approach to access than new urbanists. “I’m very adamant about single-family detached; the vast majority lend themselves to a zero-step entry,” Smith told New Urban News. When privacy is an issue, it can typically be achieved through other means, such as greenery or low walls, she said. New urbanists may find fault with that idea, Ball indicated. “Duany has taken the position that anything you do that pushes houses farther apart and perpetuates a suburban condition is undesirable,” Ball noted.

Nobody should build townhouses above retail, Smith insisted, because those units will be inaccessible to the disabled. A good alternative would be two or three layers of flats, which “look exactly like townhouses above retail, but which have an elevator,” allowing anyone to live or visit there. Smith’s approach would make popular new urban building types, like fee-simple live-work units and stacked townhouses, difficult to build.

On the other hand, Smith is not opposed to small apartment buildings with accessible ground-floor units and walkup second-floor units. Those are “not built a great deal,” she said, and their ground-floor units can provide barrier-free living.

The charrette team created plans for six model projects of differing kinds across metropolitan Atlanta, including a town center that Duany said could be built on the site of a dying suburban mall. Instead of building elderly housing and senior centers where land is cheapest, these facilities should be built where there’s access to transportation and a mix of activities, he argued. Most of the six projects involve partnerships between a developer and a municipality. There’s a strong chance that four of the projects will be implemented, according to Ball.

To examine Lifelong Communities issues further, the Commission has started to develop a set of standards at the building, street, community and regional scales. It will be up to each municipality or county to decide whether and how to act on the charrette’s ideas and standards.