The new apartment buildings springing up like mushrooms on all the vacant lots in Shawville are not accessible to anyone with limited mobility. You may not have thought about this—I hadn’t, until a fellow member of the Access Squad brought it to my attention.
The upper-floor units are only accessible by outdoor stairs with a sharp 90-degree turn at the top—impossible to navigate with a walker or wheelchair, especially while carrying groceries. The ground-floor units aren’t much better: the doors are only 30 inches wide, which isn’t wide enough for most wheelchairs or walkers to pass through.
I don’t know who the builder is, but perhaps some readers of this paper do and can raise the concern. Retrofitting the completed buildings would be difficult—and expensive—but there may still be time to install wider doors on some of the units that haven’t yet been framed. I realize that changes would require a redesign, which may be complicated given the pace of construction. Still, I think it’s worth asking—not for myself or for my friends who are currently living there with full mobility, but for anyone who may one day need accessible housing due to age, illness, or injury. It’s not hard to imagine how suddenly one’s mobility can change—and then, those apartments would be not just impractical,
but impossible to live in.
Robert Wills
Shawville and Thorne
(Ed.)
(Editor’s note: The Access Squad held a meeting on May 14 about this issue. Check the June 4 edition of the Journal for an update.)
