Accessibility: can there be too much of a good thing?

[Yikes]

Has anyone heard of this situation before?

I have a large not-for-profit housing client that got embroiled in a year-long dispute with HUD (not my project). This client had developed public housing using funding sources that required at least 15% of the units to be mobility accessible. On senior projects these same funders require 50% of the units to be mobility accessible.
HUD inspected the plans for Section 504 compliance and they saw that 15% were mobility accessible instead of the usual 5%. HUD is concerned that this represents a kind of reverse-discrimination against persons who don't have disabilities. That's because when a unit that has been designated as mobility accessible becomes available tenant selection is (by law and precedent) prioritized towards persons with disabilities. HUD was concerned that too much prioritization towards persons with disabilities was a potential violation of the Fair Housing Act. My client said it took about 40 hours of meetings over the course of a year to straighten things out between HUD and the other funders.

This is the first time I've heard of such a thing. Have any of you encountered it before?
The upshot is that when we provide accessible units beyond the usual minimum 5% mobility / 2% communication, we should not call this excess "mobility units" on the plans that HUD will review. Instead, we just happen to design them with the accessible features, but we don't call them accessible.

 

[Yankee Chronicler]

Never encountered that but, having once worked as staff architect for an inner-city public housing authority, no idiocy emanating from HUD surprises me.

 

[steveray]

Near as I know, there is nothing saying you cannot rent an accessible unit to someone who doesn’t need it…

 

[Yankee Chronicler]

I have posted previously, I believe, that when I was still working as an architect in a firm that designed condominiums, developers initially resisted the State's mandate to construct a percentage of the units as accessible. These weren't "luxury" condos. To the developers' surprise, they found that the accessible units sold faster than the standard units, because able-bodied buyers liked the extra maneuvering space and larger bathrooms.

 

[Yikes]

Near as I know, there is nothing saying you cannot rent an accessible unit to someone who doesn’t need it…

I think what happens is that when it's publicly funded housing, it becomes an ADA Title II government program issue, and units thazt were funded by taxpayers to be mobility accessible must be prioritized towards persons with mobility impairments.
so let's say a housing development has 100 units for very low income residents, with project-based vouchers. If you're a low-income person, getting a unit is like winning the housing lottery, because your rent will never cost you more than 30% of your monthly income.
OK, statistically about 8.5% of the U.S. population has some kind of mobility limitation, including a temporary limp, neuropathy, etc.; of that group, 15% are wheelchair users. So that's 1.275% of the population that's in a wheelchair. Let's more than double it, to 3%, on the assumption that wheelchair users might correlate to a higher incidence of poverty.

Back to our project 1000 income-qualified people apply for 100 units. Their odds of getting into a unit for a person with no disabilities are 10%.
But wait, out of that 1000 people, 30 of them (3%) are in wheelchairs, and there's 5 mobility units. Due to Title II, the government will require that those 5 mobility units be offered first to persons with mobility disabilities. The odds of a person in a wheelchair getting into a unit are now 16.7%, much better than the general population.

OK, now imagine that you're in a jurisdiction such as Los Angeles that mandates 15% of public housing be set aside for persons with mobility disabilities.
30 wheelchair users are vying for 15 units, so they have a 50% probability of getting into a unit.
The remaining 970 applicants are vying for 85 units, so that's an 8.7% probability of getting a unit.
A clever lawyer will argue that 8.7% vs. 50% odds are an indication of reverse discrimination against the able-bodied.

Now of course I'm playing a bit fast and loose with the numbers and math, but the main point is, once a local government agency mandates a much higher % of accessibility than section 504 requires, and regulations require that designated mobility units to be offered first to persons with mobility disabilities, then this can be perceived as preferential treatment.

I have posted previously, I believe, that when I was still working as an architect in a firm that designed condominiums, developers initially resisted the State's mandate to construct a percentage of the units as accessible. These weren't "luxury" condos. To the developers' surprise, they found that the accessible units sold faster than the standard units, because able-bodied buyers liked the extra maneuvering space and larger bathrooms.

When I was doing student housing at universities, the mobility units were very popular. The ladies said that seats in the bathtubs made it very easy to shave their legs.