As I noted yesterday, the AARP has come out with a new report on visitability.
Increasing Home Access: Designing for Visitability was put together by Concrete Change founder Eleanor Smith and the folks at the University of Buffalo's IDEA Center -- the two national expert sources on visitability. The fact that AARP has embraced the concept should give this very important trend the push it needs. It is a trend that's far too slow in coming!
I'd like to see Louisville get behind the visitability movement. Even with the economic downturn, new houses go up all the time. It would be great if, like Pima County, Arizona, these homes could have at least one no-step entrance and a bathroom on the ground-level floor that visitors in wheelchairs can use. Those are 2 of the 3 simple requirements of "visitability." The other is also a no-brainer: Doorways and halls wide enough to get through in a wheelchair.
New report from AARP gives weight to visitability
'They could have all been accessible!'
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.
Kaitlyn's steps
I'd like to offer a little variety but the stories seem to keep coming: this time it's Kaitlyn Lasitter whose recent days in the news eye have shown us another inaccessible home.
At the top of yesterday's C-J was a big picture (here online, over on the right, scroll down a bit) of Kaitlyn being carried into her house by her father. You can see the steps in the lower left of the photo.
Kaitlyn Lasitter was the teen whose feet were chopped off by a Kentucky Kingdom amusement park ride last summer. There's lots online about that -- here's a C-J story, and a google search brings up tons more.
Very little, though, about her home's inaccessibility. In yesterday's C-J story, reporter Charlie White tell us that
Before Kaitlyn received her prosthesis, just getting from one room of the family's Germantown home to another was difficult for her because the door openings of the family's near-century-old home are too narrow for her wheelchair.
Randy Lasitter said he often had to carry her, while at other times, Kaitlyn had to crawl.
I'm glad this got into the story. I'd still like to see more focus on the problems caused by inaccessible homes in this community. And I'd like to see some public discussion about what should be done about it. Lots of commununities are ensuring that new homes have at least basic access. That's a movement called visitability, but it hasn't made it to Louisville. You can learn more about it at www.visitability.org.
Kaitlyn Lasitter, like Audrey White, lives in a house in Germantown.
Audrey's ramp
Saturday's news reported that finally Audrey White was going to get a wheelchair ramp for her home.
Provided through "the kindness of strangers."
Audrey White is the 8-year-old girl much in the news last week due to her wheelchair having been stolen -- for scrap metal, as it turns out -- from in front of her home.
The reason her chair was outside, with no one around, allowing it to be stolen, is a story of the routine inaccessibility of most of Louisville's housing stock, including the house in Germantown where Audrey lives with her family.
Many -- probably thousands -- of wheelchair users in Louisville live in similarly inaccessible homes.
And this isn't the first time something bad has happened because of that.
And yet what was interesting to me about this news story as it unfolded last week was that, although clear that the reason the chair was unattended was because her mom was helping Audrey out of the house, with the chair sitting at the foot of the steps, no news story focused on the problem of the inaccessible home.
To be sure, the news story WAS the stolen chair. But the theft was to my way of thinking possible in the first place because of the inaccessible home.
As the week unfolded, the news turned, as it usually does with stories of this sort, to the "outpouring" of the community. The media surrounding the theft had prompted Teri and Steve Bass to donate a new $5,000 wheelchair for Audrey -- and that then became the story (here and here).
Which was fine -- donating a wheelchair is no small deed, and it's good to see folks help out.
But... -- and yes, for me there is always a "but" when I see stories like this -- but wouldn't it be swell if this community was so generous about access?
Finally, though, that too happened:
Audrey's story touched many in the community, including several who're working to build a deck and ramp onto the back of her home.
"I won't have to carry her and the wheelchair," White said. "It's going to make her life easier and my life, too."
Kelley Construction, along with several United Auto Workers members who work for Ford, plan to get started on the project next week. (Source: Girl's stolen, wrecked wheelchair recovered, CJ Dec. 1, 2007)
OK. That's great!
Now: what about those other thousand who have no ramps on their homes?
I'd like to see the CJ's Jessie Halladay do a story about that.
Students learn renovation but not access
The Courier-Journal's Sara Cunningham had a story in the Metro Section on Friday about the house that Iroquois High students are renovating as part of the school's technical education program.
Great pictures -- but not a word about access.
This would be a great chance for a home to be made wheelchair accessible. It could have been a "visitable" home.
But... evidently not.
Or else it wasn't reported.
Another missed opportunity to make Louisville's housing stock more welcoming.
What happened with coverage of the "house that love built" ?
You'd have to be living under a Metro-area rock -- with no access to any local media at all -- to miss the fact that ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition just completed a new home for U. of L. freshman Patrick Henry Hughes, who uses a wheelchair and is blind, and who lives with his family in the Buechel area.
The home appears to be totally accessible -- although it's hard to find out much about the access details through the fog of inspiration. Despite the almost non-stop media coverage in the C-J and on the local TV stations -- and all their websites -- the story has been played throughout as inspiration, not cutting-edge design. The phrase "the house that love built" has been the headline of at least two (here and here ) and maybe more stories in the C-J. Of course it's the Extreme Makeover folks promoting this.
But they have a willing co-conspirator in Father Hughes. The "inspiration" slant is something Hughes' father, Patrick John Hughes, seems to have been encouraging if not orchestrating for a long time. A Google search of "Patrick Henry Hughes" brings up many stories about the "selfless dad" who marches with his son in the U. of L. band, pushing his wheelchair. Most of these stories end up being more about the father's selflessness than about a college freshman's interests and lifestyle. Makes you wonder a bit. But that's not the topic of this blog posting. (If you want more on what I've learned over the years about such inspirational treatments, you might want to read this and this.)
In all of the media overkill of the last week, we finally get this:
Patrick Henry Hughes eagerly summed up his favorite feature of the new home:
"It's wonderful the fact that the house is more accessible," he said, smiling. "I can do everything by myself when I want to. It's gonna be great!"
Ah yes: that is the point. Too bad it was so thoroughly buried in the story 'Hometown heroes' honored.
I've yet to find any real coverage of what the actual access consists of. I've still got no real idea of precisely why and how Hughes is going to be able to be independent (despite his dad) in his new digs. Those are the pictures I'd like to see. Another story that didn't get reported, along the lines of actual access, comes via yesterday's press release from the University of Louisville -- about how Hughes
will be able to feel the shape and layout inside and out through a plastic model of the home, thanks to efforts at the Rapid Prototyping Center at UofL’s J.B. Speed School of Engineering.
Didn't see this anywhere in all the mass media hoopla, either.
Perhaps the most troubling thing about the way the story has been covered is that access is presented as something "special" being given out of "love" to Hughes by all the selfless volunteers.
Wouldn't it be better -- and more accurate -- to report that home access should be every person's right -- not just a lucky special recipient who gets a "gift"??
What the media coverage has done for me is a little different, maybe, than what it has done for the thousands who have watched and read and "felt good": All the coverage just makes me think of all the other wheelchair users in the community who could use access in their homes -- and could get it, if attention were paid to the issue, rather than focusing on the "inspiration" of one college-age fellow whose dad is ever-present. If Elite Homes, for example, decided to start incorporating the principles of visitability in all their new homes.
It makes me think about how little home access gets discussed at all in the Metro area. I'll try to blog a bit more on that in the future.
If this new home allows Patrick Hughes to quit having to be carried everywhere, that's a winner in my book.
I do have to wonder why the college guy seems to get lifted everywhere by his dad. Hughes the father, were he of a different mindset, perhaps, could use his son not so much as a public inspiration but as a way to draw attention to the things that should be accessible, but aren't.
Now that would be a real act of love -- with presents for a lot more folks than just one family.