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.
California housing is just as bad. My family has a townhouse, because that was what we could afford and it was also the least scary looking place we could find after months and months of looking. The stairs are too narrow for a lift of any sort and the railing is… not good. We can’t afford to fix that. We are all disabled to various degrees, I’m the worst off when it comes to mobility, but my parents are looking into maybe trying to find a single floor place in a few years because we just cannot and should not deal with stairs.
We probably won’t be able to afford one though. None of the places in this area that we can afford (that are also not clearly the set to a horror movie) are single story. One we looked at 5 years ago was on fricking STILTS.
And every time I need to go down to get food or go up to the shower or my bedroom I am reminded of the time i had to crawl from my room, down the hall, and down the stairs to get to the car and go to the ER because I was fine one minute and then I was suddenly in too much pain to sit upright or stand…
I am constantly in fear of one of the joints in my leg popping out while i’m on the stairs, or my spine acting up like that first time, and falling down the stairs… I have in fact had joints pop out on the stairs and caught myself on the walls and caused myself more injuries doing it.
And this isn’t accounting for any of the other dozen quirks of the house that make my life more painful because I am not able bodied. Accessible housing needs to be a more easy to come by thing.
Published
This Is a Backup Blog 