Yesterday the Austin City Council voted on that Visitability ordinance that would have required all new homes being built within Austin city limits to be fully accessible in all ways to people in wheelchairs and walkers. They only approved two of the list of things Betty Dunkerley wanted: a 30-inch clearance on one lower-level bathroom door and reinforced bathroom walls in that bathroom to allow for future installation of grab bars. The outcry from the people who wanted us all to be prepared for any potential future visit by a disabled person or our own potential future disability is, of course, loud and somewhat whiny. My favorite quote is this one:

“I grew up in a home where I couldn’t get out the front door or the back door. I had to wait for somebody. So, if a fire broke out in my home I was going to burn as a child unless there was somebody there to take me out.”
–Jennifer Macphail

To me, this sounds like a family issue. I’m sorry her family either couldn’t be bothered to make her own home accessible, or that they didn’t avail themselves of the various programs to help people with disabilities retrofit their homes for accessibility, but just because her family didn’t make sure she could get out of the house in the event of a fire (which obviously never happened) does that mean every last one of us has to live in a house designed for people in wheelchairs? Sorry, but that doesn’t fly with me. My home is not open to the public. Should my home and any future home I build need to be accessible to someone with a disability, I will do what my family has always done and make it accessible.

My perfect analogy for this plan they wanted is that we should all drive wheelchair accessible vans, because you never know when some friend, family, or other person in a wheelchair might want to catch a ride with us somewhere, or sometime in the future we might need a wheelchair accessible van ourselves, or when we sell our auto there might be someone in a wheelchair that wants to buy it. Those were their arguments for why all new houses in Austin had to be fully accessible — visitable — and those arguments are just as ridiculous when applied to private homes as they are when applied to personal transportation. And we all know that as soon as they decided new houses had to comply with rules such as this, it wouldn’t be long before there was whining that older houses had to be retrofitted to comply as well. I have seen this happen on other building ordinances in other cities.

The Austin City Council better be just as smart as they were on this ordinance when they finally get around to deciding whether or not to require all homeowners to retrofit their home with green energy savers before being able to sell their homes. I’m for going green as much as I am for making people’s lives easy to live, but I don’t want anyone telling me I have to install new storm windows or solar panels before I can sell my home anymore than I want to have my thermostat and light switches less than 48″ off the ground and a front door with a ramp. It’s my home, and I’d very much like to do with it what I see fit to do with it, thank you very much.

And this quote made me laugh too:

“I have done politics in this town and at the Capitol. I have never in my 25 years seen a decision already been made before the public hearing was ever held.”
–Bob Kafka

Dude, if you haven’t ever seen a decision made in politics before the public had its say about the issue, you have not been paying attention for those 25 years!