The Tightrope Act That Is Looking for an Apartment as a Disabled Person

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.

More Buildings

In keeping with the theme of my last article, I thought I’d write another one on the annoying architecture of some buildings I’ve had to frequent for a time; namely, schools.

I’ve attended nine schools in my life, and I realized the other day that with the exception of the last three (one of which is online so it shouldn’t even really count…), none of them were built in an accessible way. In other words, had I been “disabled enough” to use mobility aids from childhood, I could literally not have attended any of the schools I went to.

The Office That Tried Its Best to Be Accessible

Once upon a time, I left my house every day to go to work—an actual desk job in an actual office. It should not come as a surprise to any of you who live in today’s society that this building was not accessible. It was not the day I started the job, April 27, 2015, and it was not on the day I left, September 13, 2019. “But it was so much better then!” my abled coworkers would protest. “See, we installed an accessible toilet!”

As you will see in this article, that wasn’t enough.