In past months I have had occasion to be driving west on Muhammad Ali to the medical complex. Driving there, I pass the massive construction project going on just to the east of downtown Louisville. It's officially called the Clarksdale HOPE VI Revitalization. It's the old Clarksdale housing projects, torn down and being rebuilt.
The blocks and blocks of buildings going up seem to be townhouses. Lovely designs -- don't look like the old low-income "projects" of my youth -- and of course, that's part of the idea behind all this.
Except.
Except they all have steps. Just like brownstones in New York. Steps up to the front door. Steps as far as I could see, creating the streetscape. Steps.
Now I have no doubt that the grand poobahs in charge of this are complying with all "laws" -- I'm sure there's a percentage set aside for "the handicapped" by law.
That's not what I'm getting at. I'm getting why we continue -- continue!! -- to build housing stock so that if we get older we're going to be forced into a nursing home, out of our homes. Continue to build places like this so if you've got somebody in the family who's in an accident or has diabetes and loses their legs you're going to have to be on a waiting list for one of the very few of those "percentages" that are accessible.
Why does it have to be this way? Is there no vision?
Every morning when I drove past this array of homes with steps, I could hear my friend Eleanor Smith of Atlanta's voice: "And they could have all been accessible!"
Yes, they could have.
Eleanor is the mother of the concept known as visitability. You don't hear much about it in Louisville.
These units I've been passing on Muhammad Ali look to me as though they're inspired by what's called the New Urbanism -- one of the silliest examples of which is Norton Commons, way the heck out in what used to be called the boonies.
And to hear Eleanor tell it, the New Urbanists simply don't like access.
