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An international effort to make all homes visitable!
info@concretechange.org 600 Dancing Fox Road Decatur GA 30032 USA
Builder Exec affirms low cost of Visitability!!
February 22. 2004
A state homebuilder’s association executive director now has publicly confirmed what Visitability advocates have been saying for many years: When Visitability features are planned in advance by a well-informed builder, typical added cost is very low for a new, single-family detached home to offer these three essential features:
Added typical cost?
Less than $100 for homes on concrete slabs, and $300-600 for homes with
crawl spaces or basements. Less than
the cost of one bay window.
These figures are the ones disseminated through the Power
Point made by the EasyLiving Home program in Georgia, written by Eleanor Smith
of Concrete Change and read for accuracy prior to publication by Ed Phillips,
Executive Director of the Home Builders Association of Georgia. Over the past six months, the Power Point
has been shown to more than a dozen groups of Georgia builders of for-profit
homes, to a total audience of over 500 builders. None of these builders has contradicted the cost estimates. The EasyLiving Home program has certified
more than 225 completed homes so far, built on sites varying from the flat, sandy terrain
of coastal Georgia to the hard clay and steep lots of the North Georgia Mountains. These homes range in price from around
$80,000 to over $600,000.
Ed Phillips has been
an open-minded and forward-thinking member of the EasyLiving Home coalition for
over three years. He says he is
willing to be contacted at misterEd@hbag
to affirm the cost estimates.
Concrete Change reported in 1994 that Atlanta Habitat for
Humanity had built zero step entrances on more than 30 homes with crawl spaces,
omitting no home despite a wide variety of terrains, at an average additional
cost of less than $200 per home. In
1996, Concrete Change reported that a director of an Atlanta-area affordable
housing group confirmed their added costs for the wider doors and zero step
entrance on more than 120 private, mid-price single-family homes on concrete
slabs to have been less than $75 per home.
The IDEA Center at the School of Architecture and Planning, State
University of New York at Buffalo, analyzed the cost of building a hypothetical
visitable single story ranch home with a basement (in snow country). They
found that there was virtually no increase in cost and a local builder
confirmed their analysis.
A recent example of cost data springs from the campaign of
the Houston (Texas) Center for Independent Living to pass a Visitability
ordinance. The January 23, 2004, Houston
Business Journal reported the following:
“Majestic Homebuilders Inc.
President Christian Vandaele grew weary of listening to builders debate about
the potential cost of making affordable housing wheelchair accessible. Each
builder tossed out a different cost prediction, ranging from zero to $5,000
per unit. (Italics added)
"I thought it would be more economical to just build one than
listen to them for another 24 hours," says Vandaele, whose nine-year-old
Houston company has built 500 single-family affordable housing units catering
to buyers with total household income between $25,000 and $40,000.
Vandaele's
experiment proved doable -- and relatively inexpensive. He says making an east
Houston home wheelchair accessible added only $200 to his building costs.”
Many building professionals in the past have disregarded,
often vociferously, the low cost projections Visitability advocates across the
country have put out. Now that an
executive director of a state homebuilders association has confirmed low costs,
perhaps those pressing for universal design, accessibility and Visitability
will feel even more empowered to challenge extremely high costs when they are
put forth. Builders should be held
accountable to explain why they cannot produce inexpensive basic access when
others have been able to accomplish that.
Builders often respond by bringing up extremely difficult
cases. (The tiny bathroom squeezed
under a staircase. The house on a
seashore where code requires the first habitable floor to be many feet above
grade.) The logical response is that
the access feature in question should not be applied in those cases—nor should
the multi-thousand dollar projected costs be averaged in to the cost of
Visitability. These builders should
be challenged to move their focus from worst- case scenarios to the high
percentage of new homes where Visitability is readily feasible.
Copyright 2004, Eleanor Smith, Concrete Change
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