If there’s one thing I really missed during these sixty-seven months of 2020, it’s sunlight, fresh air and vitamin D. And grass. I think I literally haven’t touched grass in over a year. In other normal years, in the summer months, I went to see friends, I travelled a bit, sometimes I grabbed a book and went to hang out at a neighbourhood park for a few hours. But this summer, I could go no further than my teeny-tiny balcony.
Why couldn’t I go walk outside, you ask? Well, under normal circumstances, walking as poorly as I do with a walker for any distance is tiring. Add to that my building’s inaccessibility—there are three non-automatic doors and four steps separating me from the street—and I’d be exhausted before even getting off the property. If this place had so much as a single ramp, I could have bought a wheelchair and gone outside this summer without exhausting myself, but no, instead I had to sit on my minuscule balcony and stare with envy at my neighbour’s dog frolicking in the grass.
(There is another exit, but there’s a literal tree growing in the middle of the path there. I wish I was kidding.)
That settled it for me: I’ve had it up to here living in an inaccessible building. I want—I need—to live in a place I can move in fully (and also ideally with soundproofing that doesn’t make me feel like my upstairs neighbour is about to crash through the ceiling…)
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a place as a disabled person, even a mildly disabled person that doesn’t even have that many requirements?
Very.
I started looking on websites that advertise apartments for rent in Quebec. Let’s try, for example, Kijiji.com. I set up the general search for the region I want, long-term location: there are 966 places available. I open the sidebar and start adding filters.
First, I input the maximum monthly rent I can afford: I’m down to 435 results.
Then I specify that I want an apartment or a rental condo, not a house: 390.
Next, the size of the apartment. I want at least one closed bedroom, not a studio: 354.
So far so good, right? So now we get into the nitty-gritty of adding what I actually need to be able to, you know, physically enter my apartment.
An elevator in the building: 75 results.
An entrance to the building with a ramp and free from obstacles: 19.
And for fun I add that the place must allow cats, because having Kenji with me is non-negotiable and it’s still legal in Quebec for landlords to forbid pets, for some reason: 8.
There are apparently a grand total of eight apartments in which I could potentially live. And keep in mind that this isn’t even looking at any extras, like whether utilities are included. If I dare add another request, it will doubtless inform me that the apartment I want doesn’t exist.
Of course I’m only using Kijiji as an example here because it’s the biggest, but every website I tried was the same. Have too many special needs (like the need to be able to enter the building I pay to live in) and good luck to ya!
But what I eventually realized is that the information about elevators, ramps and accessibility was optional; most landlords and people advertising on these sites didn’t bother checking the required boxes. So I started just searching for places I could afford that were big enough. If you look at the example above, that means I stopped at the point where I had 354 results. Meaning I had to wade through 354 ads, looking at photos of apartments that weren’t convenient for me, reading descriptions of places I couldn’t live in.
Some were practical and had as principal photo that of a little duplex or triplex, or an entrance with stairs and no ramp, letting me know at a glance that the building was not accessible and allowing me to ignore it without clicking. Other had a photo of a very nice bathroom, so I had to click on the ad, before finding a picture of the building itself and judge if it was disability-friendly or not. And quite often, there were no photos of the outside at all, leaving me with the description, in which they sometimes mentioned elevators, parking garages or the lack thereof, or, if the apartment itself was interesting enough that I really wanted to know about the building, Google Maps Street view.
In other words, I got saddled with all that tedious mental labour just because a landlord didn’t bother to check the “elevator” box (and because such sites don’t make disclosing that information compulsory).
Once in a while, I did find a place that seemed perfect on paper. Affordable, recently built, pets accepted, with elevator and parking garage… And nine times out of ten, I clicked further in my research, to the description or the building’s website, only to eventually hit the snag that it was reserved for retirees or semi-retirees, 50+ or 55+.
Because as we all know, only people middle-aged and older can possibly need accessible places to live. Younger disabled people can choose between paying a fortune for an adapted apartment, or get used to living in inaccessible buildings until they hit the golden age where they can finally live in a place that works for them—if they can still afford those places by then, of course.
Yes, that it what we always come back to: money. I don’t want to get too political on this blog, but in 2014, 20% of Canadians between 25 and 64 were disabled, and almost a quarter of those were considered low-income, compared to 9% in the able-bodied population (source). And this is not only people who are too disabled to work either, it includes people like me, who have the abilities and the willingness to hold a job, but said job would need to be adapted to my needs, and many employers are simply unwilling or unable to make those adaptations. And in order to receive the government disability benefit (which is still below the poverty line, by the way), I’d be allowed to earn a maximum of $483 a month. Not the best way to find a place to live that is not a literal inaccessible hole.
And I’m not even going to mention the $600 pandemic aid we got. Six. Hundred. Not $600 per month, $600 TOTAL! So I guess… thank you Justin Trudeau for paying 7.6% of all the rent I paid since the pandemic started?
In conclusion, trying to find an apartment acceptable for living in as a disabled person is, in this day and age, like walking a tightrope. On one side, you have all the landlords and rental sites that are beyond unhelpful at giving us the information we need. And on the other, you have the government that is beyond unhelpful at giving us the money we need.
As you know, my terrible balance makes it impossible for me to walk a tightrope; you can imagine how painful this search was.
So if a landlord comes across this blog, hopefully you can find a few tips to make your ads more accessible to people like me. And here are a few more:
- If you have a rental office next to your accessible building, make sure that office is accessible too…
- Don’t accept cats only if they’re declawed, that is not cool.
- Be nice people. 2020’s been hard on all of us.
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