As somebody with a spinal cord injury who uses a wheelchair, we had to search for over two years before finding a home with no steps to the entrance in Cincinnati. Even then, we needed to spend tens of thousands to renovate the kitchen and bathrooms to meet my accessibility needs. The YIMBY movement might not directly fix housing accessibility, but making these changes in a neighborhood where decades of NIMBY-ism have inflated home values would be impossible.
Also, not sure if there’s a ping group for disability rights in here anywhere?
!ping YIMBY
Maxahoy on
> …I had to abandon my dream of building what would have been my first fully accessible home, after a neighbor started a monthslong campaign against the construction. He argued that the house, which would’ve been the first in the neighborhood that could accommodate a wheelchair, wouldn’t fit in. That neighbor hosted a meeting (upstairs, in a building without an elevator) where about 50 community members and a city councilor discussed how to stop the project. I later learned that, at the meeting, one person suggested that I didn’t need a wheelchair-accessible house, because I could simply be carried up the stairs, like other disabled people they knew.
>Looking back, I’m struck by the fact that those meeting attendees were inadvertently paving the way for their own eventual exclusion.
NIMBY-ism is inherently able-ist, and I don’t think that’s a hard argument to make. At what point does historical preservation become ableist though?
2 Comments
As somebody with a spinal cord injury who uses a wheelchair, we had to search for over two years before finding a home with no steps to the entrance in Cincinnati. Even then, we needed to spend tens of thousands to renovate the kitchen and bathrooms to meet my accessibility needs. The YIMBY movement might not directly fix housing accessibility, but making these changes in a neighborhood where decades of NIMBY-ism have inflated home values would be impossible.
Also, not sure if there’s a ping group for disability rights in here anywhere?
!ping YIMBY
> …I had to abandon my dream of building what would have been my first fully accessible home, after a neighbor started a monthslong campaign against the construction. He argued that the house, which would’ve been the first in the neighborhood that could accommodate a wheelchair, wouldn’t fit in. That neighbor hosted a meeting (upstairs, in a building without an elevator) where about 50 community members and a city councilor discussed how to stop the project. I later learned that, at the meeting, one person suggested that I didn’t need a wheelchair-accessible house, because I could simply be carried up the stairs, like other disabled people they knew.
>Looking back, I’m struck by the fact that those meeting attendees were inadvertently paving the way for their own eventual exclusion.
NIMBY-ism is inherently able-ist, and I don’t think that’s a hard argument to make. At what point does historical preservation become ableist though?