Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Universal Design and Co-housing

[Jim Snyder-Grant (jimsg]

At New View (Acton MA), the common house is totally accessible, including
the kitchen. All base plans for individual units had the starting
fundamentals in terms of door widths & turning radii. Some of us chose to go
the next step and have roll-in entrances (no stairs), grab bars, etc. The
other houses are visitable, if there is a way to get up stairs. One
household has a portable ramp, which has been lent to other households from
time to time. Our steep site has winding sidewalks that are (almost)
entirely at chair grade.  (the exception is our path through the woods - a
decision that got written up in the coho journal).

Accessibility was a primary goal of the group for our common space, and the
ability to easily modify the base plans to make homes accessible was a
design principal.

-Jim

Where we just had a nice meeting on the following:
-Options for getting the now-popular basketball activity OUT of the parking
lot (discussion & forming a working group)
-Dealing with our broken dishwasher (shared ideas & information, and
empowered the common house committee to go ahead and do whatever they wanted
about it - repair, replace with a used one, replace with a new one).



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