Housing Minister confused by notion of disabled person upstairs

As disabled people, we know accessible housing is hard to come by. It can take months and even years to find something accessible-ish, let alone a fully accessible home that meets our needs. On top of that, the additional time to modify the home is a whole other story. 

With such significant demand on accessible housing, when Housing Minister Megan Woods recently made a seemingly throwaway comment that ruled out multi-storey homes from abiding by standards of universal design our insides cringed. 

Woods' comment came during the Social and Community Services Select Committee meeting on June 21. Green MP Jan Logie had asked Woods about Kāinga Ora’s 15% accessible housing targets. “It’s going to be higher than 15% coming through,” Woods answered. “Everything we’re doing, largely, is universal design where it makes sense.”

However, Woods appeared to misunderstand the principles of universal design when it came to multi-storey buildings. “I mean obviously if something is upstairs, there’s no point making it a universal design,” she said.

There seems to be this narrow understanding on what accessibility is among people who purport to be experts that accessibility only applies to single-storey houses. 

The reality is, many of us live happily in multi-storey homes. Some of us - shock, horror! - are able to manage stairs, and others happily occupy a downstairs bedroom, while our whānau or friends live upstairs.

The Minister’s apparent belief that no disabled people are capable of living in a multi-storey house reflects disappointingly outdated perspectives on who our communities are, and what we are capable of. 

We also know that when it comes to housing, accessibility is more than just physically getting into the building. Accessibility looks like lowered benches so you can prepare breakfast by yourself. It looks like handrails if there so happens to be steps, and safe, secure seating in the shower if you need it. 

The D*List spoke to Geoff Penrose of Lifemark, an expert on Universal Design for 10 years. Lifemark helps build around 600 universal design homes a year and yes, he says, it is possible to build multi-storey homes that meet the requirements for Universal Design. He describes universal design as design suitable for all people at all stages of life; that's “equity of experience”.

Penrose says the problem with Kāinga Ora’s Accessibility Policy is that it talks about suitability “for conversion to accessible if needed in the future”.

But future flexibility is less relevant than present accessibility, especially with an ageing population. “We're less and less about what could be, and more about what is actually built in the first place,” Penrose says. “Why not have your main design profile be universally designed to begin with, and then the exception is something else.” 

So, to the policy makers at the Ministry of Housing: before making general assumptions on what accessibility means to you, work with and listen to the community it impacts the most. 

Large-scale, medium-density housing developments will inevitably have stairs. But that shouldn’t automatically preclude building to universal design standards. For example, why not ensure lifts a part of the design from the start - including in buildings that are less than 3-storeys.

Disabled people have been adjusting and stretching ourselves to your inaccessible designs for years. We want to see the tables turned. Don’t brush off solutions to the real life problems you created in the first place. Make universal design principles the standard, not the exception.

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🎥 Social Services and Community Committee