Cohousing-L Mailing List: wheelchair accessibility

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

Thanks to Carl Hay for his tactfully-worded consciousness-raising letter. 

I have responded at more length to Carl, but to all I would like to be 
clear that our preference is to have accessibility for every space.  We 
continue to search for those "creative solutions" that will allow this to 
be so. And until now, we wouldn't even consider solutions that did not 
meet that criterion. 

We are in the midst of numerous trade-offs and compromises as we attempt 
to build a common house for 40 people for $127,000.  Only at that point 
have we found ourselves trying, and comparing,  options that do not 
fulfill all we really want -- in a number of regards. Such a decision 
would involve looking really hard at the implications, and the 
trade-offs, and looking for the best we could accomplish with our very 
limited resources.  And Carl's letter will be part of what we consider.

One other thing that would help us is if places that DO have an elevator 
in the common house could share the specifics of what elevator they used, 
the cost of the equipment and additional construction cost. Part of our 
dilemma is that we haven't succeeded in finding anything under about 
$20,000.

So tell me, not only if you have upstairs spacein your common house that 
needs to be accessed by stairs, but also if you do have elevators, and 
about them. (One solution in some places is a site plan in a hillside 
with external access to upstairs. Our site is dead flat, so tell me if 
you created such access on a previously FLAT site.)

In dialogue (multi-logue), Lynn at RoseWind           welcome [at] olympus.net