Today I begin my 55th year on this planet. It will be a landmark year next birthday--that magical one where discounts and offers put me in a new marketing category. I have one more year of being middle-aged. Somehow, magically, one year from today, I will be transformed into an "early senior" as I've heard it described. Aging, as you can guess is on my mind today.

The last 4 years of my life have been transformative. I swear my biological clock said, you're 50 and now you break down. I take more medicines and supplements than I care to admit. I monitor my health in ways I never imagined. There are times when the hormones in my body render it alien to me. I keep thinking about how when you go through puberty the powers that be kindly offered classes and films to explain what to expect from a changing body. No such manuals and warnings have been easily available on the other end of the hormonal growth cycle. One of those "dropped threads" that it would be nice if it were more a part of our culture.

I've also been thinking a lot about size acceptance this week. Not that too many weeks go by that I don't think about that. After all, I live in a fat body and it is hard to escape that fact in day-to-day interactions. But this week I'm working on several projects that have brought ideas to the forefront. I've participated in some lively discussions. I've been editing a book that addresses some fundamental sociological questions on the topic. I've been planning a project for PDANation.

This week (July 26) marked the 21st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and I've read several things online about questions of accessibility. I always think about such questions around this time because of the anniversary. Last summer I was working on an article about this time, so it was way more prominent in my mind than this year.

The thing is that aging, size acceptance and disabilities have a lot in common. These categories are not front and center in our culture. They often go against the grain of the young, thin and able-bodied goals presented to us for consumption through anti-aging, weight-loss and fitness advertising that fills our daily lives.

These categories have something else in common: in a world designed with a particular kind of human being in mind, just moving around in space becomes problematic. Social geographers have noted that space is designed from cultural contexts. Certain assumptions are made before the design is even thought about and when the design of something is commissioned, some of the parameters are already set by culture and may not even be marked specifically. Assumptions are just made. People just know.

This is why Universal Design is so important. It questions these assumptions and pushes for more inclusive design. It goes to the heart of the matter and does so without dividing people up into categories. It makes the world work for everyone.

So this is my birthday wish: It is my hope that as the designers, engineers and architects of the world seek to create new things, they will be inclusive. This means that they will talk to a wide variety of people about what they need to make their lives work. It means that a wide variety of people will have a chance to be designers, engineers and architects of our spaces. It also means that the principals of universal design will become commonplace in our thinking, our building codes and our lives. That is my hope.

With appreciation to Emory University, the Rollins School of Public Health and the Goizueta Business School...
Concrete Change is pleased to announce to you, our friends
and
supporters of housing justice
the selection of
Concrete Change
as one of the recipients of

The 2011 Annual Martin Luther King Jr.

Community Service Award
For our work to promote affordable, accessible integrated housing.

"Basic access in every new home."

www.concretechange.org 404-378-7455

Program and Award Ceremony:

Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 4:00 p.m.

I have published an article in Desert Companion, a local magazine, on Inclusive Housing in Southern Nevada.

Let Us In: Think accessible housing is
just an issue for the “disabled”? Think again. Making Las Vegas livable in the future means making homes more visitable — today

Please read and pass along to others.

If you are local, you can get issue in Coffee Bean & Tea Leafs in the Metro Las Vegas area.

And thanks to all who helped me research and write this article! Especially Marteen Moore, who generously let me come into her home.

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There are a slew of people nationwide who end up on nursing homes simply because housing isn't accessible. They do not need 24 hour nursing care, they just need shelter they can get into and move around in.

More young people are winding up in nursing homes

It's no longer unusual to find a nursing home resident who is decades younger than his neighbor: About one in seven people now living in such facilities in the U.S. is under 65. But the growing phenomenon presents a host of challenges for nursing homes, while patients like Martin face staggering isolation.

I cannot really add to this. It is so what we hope to do here in Vegas.

Carl and I have been trying to put a handle on what we want to do, especially with promoting visitable and accessible housing. After kicking around the concept, we have settled on a simple and elegant summary:

An excellent description of the "costs" of ignoring visitability. It's so simple. Either we care or we don't.

What’s At Stake

These are serious matters. And yet . . .

* Most builders have not yet begun to construct routine access in new houses.
* Most buyers have not yet begun to demand it.
* Most policy makers have not yet made it a priority

One of the things that holds back accommodations for differences in abilities is the paradigms through which we see things. There are many ways we are constrained by past thinking, but perhaps none are more constraining than the thinking that goes into design of the material world. Where we live, tools we use, equipment we need, roads we drive and so forth began as an idea in the minds of designers. Those minds were shaped by the culture in which they developed.

Cultural values and cultural mores are embodied in designs. This accounts for the wide varieties of approaches to the same functional problems, which makes specific places seem to be living reflections of the people who have lived there. Many believe that variety is what makes the world a beautiful and interesting place to live and visit. As an avid traveler who enjoys new places, I count myself among those who appreciate that diversity.

But people being who they are, stereotypical, prejudicial and xenophobic tendencies can also become embodied in designs, and once there, they continue to limit the lives and movements of people long after the minds of their designers have died out.

Paradigms limit the thinking of new designs as well. Once embodied, designs become the way its always been, the box that needs to be out-thought. So without someone standing up and saying "That does not work!" these patterns are often repeated even in the absence of intent.

Building homes that are not visitable by almost everyone is a good example of a paradigm that should be shifted. We live longer as a population. With long life comes limitations on mobility and ability. The old paradigm of a home is not a norm written in stone. It is an idea based upon a level of knowledge and born in a particular culture that was ignorant of diversity. In the same way that side and back doors in southern downtown stores are throwbacks to the days when darker people were expected to use the other "entrance" and whites only were allowed to walk through the front door, homes that are not accessible to wheelchairs and other mobility equipment are throwbacks to a world that pretended that we are all similarly-abled. We now better about the color of people's skin and we should know better about the status of those who require technologies to assist them in life.

All people should be welcomed.

The passage of the ADA allowed the world (and those with limitations as well) to see that we have a vast diversity of abilities. There are some that even assert that the persons living with disabilities constitute the largest minority group. We are visible now in a way that the physical barriers would not let us be before.

The appropriate response to this visibility is visitability. Homes carry with them a stigmatization of those who are differently abled. The social stigma of difference is built right into the narrow hallways, the steps to the front door, the second floor bathrooms. A house becomes a home for many reasons. Among them is who is welcomed. Extended family members with disabilities, friends and co-workers with disabilities and someday, maybe even you may need that little extra shift to know you are welcomed.

As new homes are being built, it doesn't cost that much to shift the paradigm to make a home visitable. All we need is the will to do it.