Eleanor Smith, founder of Concrete Change, believes all new residences can be—and should be—made basically accessible to people with disabilities, including those who acquire disabilities as they age. And the time to require it is now!
By Tamar Asedo Sherman
Visitability is a simple concept: every home should have one entrance with no steps and a door that is wide enough for a wheelchair to pass through (at least 32 inches wide) with a half bath on the first floor (that also has a 32-inch wide door) and enough space for a wheelchair to get in and turn around.
That’s not so much to ask for. Yet the founder of the Visitability movement, Eleanor Smith of Atlanta, Georgia, is always frustrated by how slowly the idea is catching on.
“People just don’t get it,” she said. “It’s very visual.” They don’t get it until someone in their family, a neighbor or friend breaks a leg or otherwise faces a mobility challenge. “Reality sinks in much better with a picture.”
The Spark of an Idea
Smith has been proselytizing about visitability for more than 20 years. As she tells it, “One day in 1986, I was driving around in Atlanta, my home city, and I passed though a large development of new houses. As usual, there were steps at every entrance. But this time I saw the houses differently: These homes could have all had access!” she realized. All it would take is a little planning.
Smith lives in a community that is now 100% accessible and has been in more than half of its 66 homes. But it wasn’t always that way. “I had driven past typical homes thousands of times since my disability came about at age 3 [from polio]. I had paid the price of lack of access over and over again, when I could not go to friends’ parties, suffered from being unable to get my wheelchair through bathroom doors when visiting, [and] faced great difficulty finding an apartment or house I could rent.”
In fact, for six months, she lived in a home where she had to crawl on the floor to enter the bathroom. “And I had seen wheelchair users looking out from behind the screen doors of their inaccessible, rampless homes and walker-users sitting on their porches with no way to come down into their yards.”
A Japanese architect who used a wheelchair introduced Smith to the term visitability, which he said originated with the British. But Smith was unable to track down the origins of the idea pre-Internet.
“The reason I love the term visitability—every new house with accessibility—is because it gets across the concept that it is not housing for people with disabilities, but for everyone,” Smith said. “Basic access impacts whether you can accept an invitation to someone’s home, whether you can get in and how much you can drink”—i.e., whether you will be able to use the bathroom with ease. She sees visitability as a public health issue. “As people age and caregivers have trouble managing, they look for accessible housing.”
A Global Cause
As of 2008, Habitat for Humanity Atlanta had built more than 800 visitable homes. The City of Atlanta has built more than 15,000 visitable houses since adopting a city ordinance requiring basic access in 1991. “It makes such sense, but people haven’t yet connected the dots,” Smith says.
For instance, she noted that her home state of Georgia set aside $300,000 for this year to help residents retrofit their homes for people with disabilities … and they ran out of money in February!
Her ultimate goal is to have basic accessibility become the norm in building codes the world over. In the US, a proposal for an Inclusive Home Design Act is in the works in Congress. It would require any home that gets federal assistance, including many private homes, to be visitable. The kind of federal aid covered would include assistance with down payments, grants for first-time home owners, and community development block grants. HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development) endorses the concept. In addition, the International Building Code Council is contemplating including visitability in the updated standard it is currently working on.
A common misconception about the cost of basic accessibility is the biggest barrier to the adoption of the federal Inclusive Home Design Act. In fact, if accessibility is built into the design, the additional cost to a new home is minimal; but if a home has to be retrofitted when the resident suddenly needs those features, the costs can be considerable. The typical cost of widening one interior door is $700 (averaging 2007 estimates of four contractors from four states experienced in widening doors in houses of residents who have become disabled). The typical cost of retrofitting to create an entrance without steps: $3,300.
Smith admits to getting impatient for change. “Every day I have to get up and decide whether the glass is 98.8% empty or .2% full. It is so darn easy and inexpensive to do and makes such a great impact on people’s lives.”
In the current state of the economy, with foreclosures rampant and home-building down, many builders are facing a hard time. Smith notes that the ease and low cost for builders to incorporate visitability features, coupled with the highly negative consequences on the public of current construction practice, makes visitability a more urgent cause than ever.
She is pleased that the concept is being picked up. Towns such as Bowling Brook, Illinois, and Tucson, Arizona, are now requiring every new house to be accessible. But most areas are still in the dark about visitability.
Urgent Action Required
What can readers do to further the visitability movement? Smith urges everyone interested to become an advocate for change in their communities. “The success and progress of our grassroots movement depends on small and large actions taken by individuals like you, alone or in small groups,” according to Smith. Her Web site (www. concretechange.org) tells you what to do and how to get started:
• Educate yourself. Read through her Web site. Become comfortable with the concept of visitability.
• Educate others. Share your information with friends. Write letters to the newspaper editor. Write articles for your neighborhood paper or periodicals.
• Call for action. Write or call your political leaders, local and federal. Contact builders and planners in your area.
• Grow the movement. Join a small group advocating for change. Start your own group and mobilize them to enact change in your community. An easy first step is to contact your legislators to encourage them to vote for The Inclusive Home Design Act HR 1408 based on the concept of visitability and sponsored by Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois). (For more information about the bill and its current status, go to thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/ z?d111:h1408:)
Smith says that no argument about visitability is complete without considering the emotional cost of not having accessible homes: “Living in a home with major barriers adds drudgery and the stress of physical danger for a person with a disability who is already working to cope with their disability.” The added work imposed on family caregivers to help with steps and to deal with consequences of narrow doors— especially bathroom doors — strains relationships and increases helpers’ fatigue and anxiety.
For everything you wanted to know about visitability go to www.concretechange.com and www.ap.buffalo.edu/idea/Visitability/, the online home for the Visitability Initiative Project which details documents pertaining to the movement. Eleanor Smith can be reached at Concrete Change, 600 Dancing Fox Road, Decatur, GA, 30032, phone 404-378-7455, or through the Web site.
Tamar Asedo Sherman writes Action’s Working World column.
Concrete Actions for Concrete Change
Concrete Change’s Web site (www.concretechange.org) spells out specific actions you can take on your own to spread the word about visitability:
• Print out the one-page visitability flier and distribute it at conferences, meetings, public bulletin boards, and wherever else you can plant the idea.
• Use the Web to promote visitability through your emails, your own Web site, and internet forums whose content you may be able to influence.
• Order the 15-minute Concrete Change videotape on the why’s and how’s of visitability, and the shorter Intro to Visitability Power Point, and show them to legislators, AARP chapters, builders, civic groups, friends and neighbors.
• Initiate a city, county, or state ordinance. Examples are offered on the Web site. This writer initiated a measure in her hometown of Huntington, New York, that was modified to expedite building permits that include accessibility features.
• Check and see if your local Habitat for Humanity affiliate is building every new home with access, whether or not the occupant has a disability. If not, lobby them to start doing so. Habitat International specifically recommends this on their Web site and other material.
• If your Public Housing Authority is building new single-family homes or townhouses, urge them to go beyond the 5% of accessible units required by law and put basic access (visitability) in the other 95%.
