Every time you look at a tiny house, ask yourself: “can a wheelchair fit in there? Can someone with limited mobility live there? Why not? Could they go up and down the stairs to that loft bed? Could they pull down the folding bed?”
If your answer is “it shouldn’t have to, this isn’t for everybody,” then what you’re really saying is “this new world I want to build doesn’t have room for disabled people in it.”
Admit that to yourself. At least be honest about your ableism.
What the fuck
how does this relate? when you build them you can make them accessable for disabilities I’ve seen it done?get off your high horse? it all depends on how you want it built calm
In case you’re wondering what defensive, non-apologetic ableism looks like, I found one!
Edited to add: seriously, if I start out with ‘ask yourself’ and follow up with ‘if your answer is that this isn’t for you’ then maybe you should #notallabledpeople yourself right out the fucking door if you decide you want to come fuck with me right now.
Today is not a day where I have patience.
The whole fad seems to be catered to young abled hipsters. The ones I’ve seen don’t seem to be built for people who need room to cook for large families, can buy their own property, don’t need to live in a big city (or have their own transportation to commute/ move their new home easily), and the ones I’ve seen where kids ARE involved never seem to capture the ‘STOP TOUCHING ME’ that young kids in the back seats of cars develop, or anyone with claustrophobia. I also haven’t seen that come with physical basements, for people in areas likely to get hit by tornadoes. Mind you, I don’t follow the show very well – my parents like the idea, so I usually see some when I’m home – but that seems to cut out an awful lot of people, right off the bat.
What has fascinated me about the response to this post the most is that a large number of responses to it have come in the form of IT’S MY HOUSE DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO or CLEARLY WHEELCHAIR COMPANIES HATE PEOPLE WHO CAN WALK, THEY’RE NOT BUILT TO USAIN BOLT or whatever.
And all that this tells me is that people jumped as fast as they could to what would allow them to be pissy, and didn’t actually follow the things I said. And that’s cool, I guess. But what I was actually explicitly addressing was the idea that small houses (which are touted as the new, environmentally-awesome, space-okay, cost-efficient, way to live) don’t need to be accessible, because tiny houses are, by definition are just not “meant for you.”
That, yes, is ableist. If the “new way of building” and so on – if this movement actually gets off the ground – is explicitly exclusive of disabled persons, that’s a problem. And if saying ‘trololol this isn’t for you, why are you making my house about you’ is your response, yeah, that’s pretty ableist, guys!
And this isn’t theoretical in its long-term effects. There’s a pretty predominant house type that was faddish a while ago near where I live – a tall, skinny rowhouse that’s really, really not accessible at all. If you want to buy a house near where I live (and no, “just move” isn’t an answer), the affordable houses are all these tall, narrow rowhouses. The difference between buying one of these homes and a house which either is already accessible or can be made accessible is an order of magnitude. The ranchers or potentially-accessible homes cost literally twice as much.
These buildings have narrow doors; narrow, turning stairs which are not even easy to install a chair lift on – even if your insurance company will pay for you to get a chair if you live in one, which, guess what, that’s why my wheelchair was declined; they usually have multiple sets of stairs leading up to the front door, making installing a wheelchair ramp nearly-impossible.
These houses were built more than a generation ago, and cannot easily be modified to become accessible. (I know, because we’re currently trying to find a way to make it so that I can get my wheelchair into and out of my house without someone else doing it for me. That’s kind of the opposite of accessible, if an able-bodied person literally has to fold up my wheelchair and carry it down two sets of stairs for me to take my wheelchair out of the house.) They also form the entirety of affordable housing where I live.
“Just rent an apartment” isn’t an option either. Not only is that a blindingly ableist response in and of itself, because inherent in it is “you don’t get to/need to have the stability of a mortgage payment, or the ability to built equity or eventually have a house that’s paid off” but rent for an accessible apartment around here actually costs more than my mortgage. I could absolutely not afford an accessible apartment where I live – the last time I checked, a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible apartment in a neighborhood similar to mine cost half-again as much as my mortgage payment.
Which is kind of my point. Housing movements and trends matter across generations & if you dismiss the entire thing as “well this is my house, it’s not about you, why should this movement have to think about you?” then, yeah, that’s exactly the ableist mindset I’m saying is pretty bullshit.
Also: do the majority of able bodied people have no concept of the fact that their able status can change? That’s what baffles me so much about ableism. Why would people not protect rights and access for the disabled when literally anyone can become disabled at any point? I mean ideally people would just give a shit about everyone regardless of shared interest but the point remains. My dad works as a general contractor and so much of his work is remodeling homes to accommodate wheelchairs and most of the time his client just got old. Or maybe someone won’t need a wheelchair forever but they break both their legs and need it for months and months. They’ll care then right?
So currently all new build homes in the UK are supposed to meet the lifetime home standards, which is built around various standards to have houses built that are accessible and remain accessible so someone can live there all their life no matter what happens to them during (/houses that have the built in potential to adapt to such a situation – for example the guidline about having a sleeping space on the entrance floor or a space that could be used as a sleeping space should it need to be at any point)
While the average new build house in the uk already comes under the small home bracket of the US movement (if not the tiny home bracket – though there arent official numbers for ‘has to be under this’ really), which is its own problem. (though does show building a small house to these standards is very possible) the website listing what the criteria is is fairly good and the criteria itself might be a fairly good mental checklist for ‘is this small home accessible’ that covers a broadbase of issues
http://www.lifetimehomes.org.uk/pages/introducing-the-design-criteria.html
(the same site has a ‘more technical’ overview of this on its for professionals tab which essentially atatches numbers to max slop gradiants and min door widths etc)
fearlessstateofmind backup 