Tell me about the Southwest Center for Independent Living. What’s the goal? We offer choices and empowerment for persons with disabilities. We give them hope. We have a wide array of services and help them navigate areas in their life that have been impacted by their disability. It could be a person with a newly acquired disability or a parent with a child born with a disability; all of the sudden your life is changed in an instant sometimes. Everything is new, scary and different.
There are 22 centers for independent living in Missouri, about 400 nationwide, and they started out of a civil rights movement. If you are a person with a disability, you can be discriminated against even unintentionally. Sometimes it’s a lack of knowledge. We are trying to change that.
Missouri State University will undergo modifications around campus this summer to improve accessibility. Should other older establishments be taking steps to become compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act? The ADA is a civil rights law. Since 1990, all new construction should be 100 percent accessible. There are existing buildings that are inaccessible physically. There is a provision in the ADA that talks about undo burden. There may be some legitimate reasons to make it not feasible to make accommodations and make a building physically accessible. We are talking about public areas. Organizations such as MSU, they probably still have problematic and physical access barriers to address because some of those buildings are pretty old. I applaud them for doing that, but there are all kinds of other areas besides the physical aspect that need to be addressed. Everyone talks about it being a building code. It’s much more than that.
If your business was in place prior to 1990, is it required to become compliant? There is no such thing as being grandfathered in. That is just a term the public uses to say they don’t have to do something. It’s the law. The compliance factor goes back to that undo burden. It’s up to the individual business establishment to provide evidence of undo burden. 1990 is a line in the sand, but I see new buildings going up that don’t meet ADA guidelines. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one is architects might understand the letter of the law, but not the visibility components. We are working to educate them. Does it make a difference if a door opens to the right or the left? When you are taking about a path of travel using a wheelchair that makes a difference. They know the design components, but they make mistakes.
Why become compliant? People with disabilities have money. If you look at the aging baby boomer generation, the most financially stable generation, they have money to spend. If they have an age-related disability and they can’t get in your business, they aren’t going to spend money in your establishment. Economically, it just makes sense to be as accessible as possible. Around 20 percent of the population of southwest Missouri is disabled. With the baby boomer generation, factoring in age-related disabilities, it could go as high as 50 percent.
New home construction is not covered by the ADA, but there is a push to promote universal design concepts. What is universal design? It means it can be used by anybody. It’s complex, but let’s say you are in the market for a new home and you’re in a wheelchair. If there is a step to the front door, that home isn’t for you. If that bathroom is so small and the doors aren’t wide enough, that’s not the home for you. That’s the case in many homes. Those housing options aren’t available. We are promoting that actively. It’s easy to design. Little things help. It could be as simple as making the electrical outlets a little higher.
Is their a shortage of universally accessible homes in the area? I can’t give you statistics, but I can say affordable accessible housing is one of the biggest problems in Springfield. Whether it’s individual construction or public housing, it’s right up there at the top. Springfield should be taking a leadership position to be a livable city.
Is the barrier to universal building cost? That’s typically been the argument in the past, saying it costs upwards of 8 percent of the total cost of the home project. We don’t believe this based on our work with builders. Slowly, there are people embracing universal design and coming out of the woodwork. We are working with the housing commission and the human right commission behind the scenes to bring that awareness. We need to advocate for these kinds of things.[[In-content Ad]]
