Montana wheelchair user talks visitability

From Daily Inter Lake in Montana:

When you’re young, healthy, and able-bodied, a ramp and wide doorways may be the last things on your mind while house-hunting.

But what if tomorrow, an unexpected accident leaves you temporarily or permanently disabled? What if in 20, 30 or 40 years, the once second-nature actions of entering, exiting, and maneuvering about your home require more effort than they used to? What if a person in a wheelchair visits your home?

Everyone doesn’t have to buy a “home for the disabled.” It simply means that new standards for constructing homes ought to be enforced, according to advocates of Visitability, a growing international movement to change standard homebuilding procedures to include specific accessibility features, regardless of residents’ current need for them.

Makenzie Miller (pictured), a wheelchair user, has lived in a “visitable” home in Kalispell since June of 2007. The home, the lower level of a duplex, features a driveway leading to a stepless entrance and a roomy interior with low countertops and wide hallways and doorways. It also includes a large bathroom with a sink that protrudes from the wall, meaning she can pull right up to it without having to worry about cabinets underneath it — something she commonly deals with in other bathrooms, along with having to back out of them into the hallway because they are not big enough for her to turn her chair around inside.

“It would be nice if [all homes] were designed without stairs,” she adds, explaining that she is used to being helped up stairs when she goes to visit family and friends. Her previous home in Bigfork was not built by visitable standards and had a ramp added for her to more easily enter and exit.

Before the ramp was built, “It was pretty difficult, and I had to have help going in and out of the house,” she said. The bathroom was less than half the size of the one in her current home, with a doorway barely wide enough for her to fit through and just enough room for her to enter and back out of.

The visitability movement was begun in the United States in 1986 by an Atlanta-based organization called Concrete Change, led by Eleanor Smith. Back then the movement was known as “Basic Home Access,” but was changed in 1990 when a Japanese architect visiting the organization told Smith that the term “visitability” was used in Europe for a similar movement. Smith explains on the Concrete Change website that she felt the term was more valuable because “automatically it makes people think ‘every house, not just special houses.’”

Smith, a wheelchair user since the age of 3, has not only witnessed the difficulties that inaccessible homes presented to other people with disabilities, but has also frequently found herself in situations when inaccessibility prevented her from attending friends’ parties, fitting her wheelchair through bathroom doors, and easily finding a home to rent. She was even forced to crawl on the floor to enter the bathroom of a home she lived in for six months.

Her decision to begin Concrete Change was ultimately prompted by her observation of a new Atlanta home development whose houses had all been built with steps at every entrance. The stepless entrance became one of three key accessibility features that Smith developed as the standards for a visitable home, with the belief that focusing on specific features was the easiest way to create widespread change in home construction.

To be considered visitable, a home must include at least one zero-step entrance; at least 32 inches of clear passage space on all main floor doors (a typical door is 30 inches wide); and at least a half bathroom on the main floor that a wheelchair can comfortably fit into.

In 2004, a question on visitability was added to Montana’s annual Behavioral Risk Factor Survey and determined that 19.3 percent of Montana homes were currently visitable. The Flathead Valley affiliate of Habitat for Humanity now builds all of its homes according to visitability standards.

“It just makes sense to go ahead and [build homes] the right way the first time,” says Dianna Kintzler, a social worker at the Summit Independent Living Center in Kalispell. Kintzler points out that when a home is built with accessibility features in mind, the cost is significantly less than if the features are added after construction.

According to the Concrete Change website, the average extra cost of building an interior door with the appropriate amount of clearance space for a wheelchair at the time of the home’s construction is $2. The cost of widening a preexisting interior door, however, averages $700.

Building a no-step entrance at the time of construction can average between $100 and $600, which Concrete Change calls a “generously high” estimate considering that 41 percent of single-family U.S. homes are built on concrete slabs that don’t add an additional cost due to the practicality for builders. In some cases, an entrance with no steps may even cost less than an entrance with steps. Compare that to the cost of retrofitting to create a no-step entrance, which averages $3,300.

And, as Concrete Change points out, the cost of having a non-visitable home may extend beyond financial expenses.

Residents of homes with limited accessibility may find their home unsuitable for entertaining guests with disabilities, recovering from surgery, or even carrying objects such as bicycles, baby carriages, or furniture through doors and up stairs. A non-visitable home may also render its disabled inhabitants “virtual prisoners,” unable to escape in the case of a fire, break-in or other emergency. A home’s marketability for resale or renting may decrease if it is non-visitable, and visitors may hold residents liable for any injuries that occur while in their home.

“It’s just a struggle,” says Kintzler. “And it all could have been avoided by just building it visitable in the first place.”

Kintzler serves on the Montana Housing Task Force, whose goals include promoting visitability, and has worked with clients who face day-to-day obstacles created by their own non-visitable homes, many with low income that prevents them making necessary renovations.

She also explains the inconvenience non-visitable homes pose for inhabitants who, as they age, are forced to disrupt their lives when they find they can no longer live in their own home.

“We want to age in place,” she says. “Most people don’t want to go to a nursing home. They’d rather be in their own home.”

A visitable home, says Kintzler, is safe, convenient, and hospitable. “It’s just better for everyone,” she says.

“We advocate for independence here,” she says. “And so this is one way that we can ensure that people with and without disabilities can live independently.”