Report: Need for ‘visitable’ housing growing

One of every five American households will contain at least one disabled resident by 2050, according to a report from Stanley Smith and Stefan Rayer of the University of Florida and Eleanor A. Smith, executive director of Concrete Change, a national organization that focuses on making housing more accessible to the disabled. Their 18-page article, “Aging and Disability,” in the Summer issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association, uses complicated mathematical calculations to argue that planners should be doing more to make single-family houses accessible to visitors with limited mobility. Fifty-one million Americans — 18 percent of the population — had a disability as of 2002, they report. Twenty-one percent of households will have at least one disabled resident in 2050, according to a set of calculations presented in the article. The authors argue that every house should have three visitability features: at least one entrance with no steps; a bathroom or half-bath on the entrance level; and interior doors with a clearance of at least 32 inches, accommodating a wheelchair. government requirements Governments scattered across the US have established 33 mandatory and 24 voluntary programs intended to make houses visitable, they report. Features such as zero-step entrances and wider doorways are advantageous not only for disabled individuals but also for able-bodied people involved in common tasks such as moving furniture, pushing baby strollers, storing bicycles, and carrying groceries, the article points out. Smith, who is based in Atlanta, has been involved in many discussions aimed at making houses in new urbanist developments visitable. The article does not alert planners to the urbanistic reasons why some houses have been built one, two, or more steps above street-level. In many instances, new urbanists have elevated the ground floor — and the front porch — when building houses close to the street. This is intended to help prevent the interiors from being overly exposed to the eyes of passersby. The elevated porches give occupants a degree of psychological comfort; people can sit on the porch without being in the uncomfortable position of being lower than the people walking by, a few feet away. Although the JAPA article carefully examines how visitability can improve the lives of millions of disabled people, it does not explain why houses have often been elevated to begin with. Planners unfamiliar with the potential conflict between urbanism and visitability may not grasp the full picture if the JAPA analysis is the only study they read. A more comprehensive look at visitability, including discussion of where and how visitability is being achieved across the country, is provided in a new AARP Public Policy Institute report, “Increasing Home Access: Designing for Visitability.” The report, which can be downloaded for free from the AARP Public Policy website, was written by Eleanor Smith and Jordana Maisel and Ed Steinfeld, both affiliated with the IDEA Center (Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access) at the State University of New York at Buffalo.