Much of Detroit’s housing stock isn’t accessible to residents with disabilities and city officials say they aren’t going to make any assumptions about what Detroiters need.
The City Council last week signed off on a $208,000 contract with national architecture and accessibility consultants expected to drill down on deficiencies in nearly two dozen multi-family rental housing complexes in Detroit and provide a range of recommended modifications to improve them.
Keegan Mahoney, program director for Detroit’s Housing and Revitalization Department, said the one-year contract with Massachusetts-based KMA, LLC., will allow the city to examine accessibility for residents with varying abilities at up to 20 buildings with rental housing. KMA will identify accessibility barriers in each property and develop reports that lay out inclusive design improvements. KMA will offer a range of low-to-higher-cost enhancements to improve building conditions for residents with disabilities – and its work will inform future programming centered on improving the accessibility of Detroit’s existing rental properties, he said.
“We shouldn’t make assumptions about who needs accessible housing and where that accessible housing should be,” Mahoney said. “The question of modifications and adaptations to existing homes is something we think about a lot. This contract will help us get a deeper understanding of what is possible as part of the normal course of buildings making improvements.”
About 93% of Detroit’s housing stock was built prior to the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1991, which prohibits discrimination in publicly funded and privately owned housing and mandates providers of certain units give equal access to housing opportunities for residents with disabilities.
Mahoney said KMA’s efforts are supported by one-time funding approved in the city’s last fiscal budget. He declined Friday to say which buildings KMA will evaluate, noting the list won’t be finalized for a couple more weeks. HRD hopes to have as many as 20, but participation will be voluntary.
“By nature of a pilot, we don’t know what the appetite for this will be,” he said. “It’s not a requirement, it is an opportunity and a resource for building owners.”
For buildings in the early stages of redevelopment project planning, the study will be a timely benefit, “not just to get an assessment, but to use it proactively on an upcoming rehab on their building,” he added.
It’ll also be key, he said, for building owners seeking tax abatements or funding support for rental housing rehabilitation projects. Accessibility is often a concern of the public and oftentimes, it becomes part of the conversation too late in the process. This study, he said, aims to change that dynamic.
“Building owners know this is a thing that Detroiters and Detroit leaders care about,” he said. “There’s a desire to see what can be done to increase accessibility. There’s a large percentage of Detroiters that have a disability and if they (building owners) are able to open up more units to a wider market of renters in the city that’s good for occupancy rates.”
Dessa Cosma, founder and executive director of Detroit Disability Power, was among the advocates who spoke at the council’s May 12 formal session in favor of the contract.
She told council members that in 2018 she bought and renovated her home in East English Village. At 36 years old, she said, the renovations made the house the first she ever lived in that was accessible to her.
“My entire life, until that point, I had been making due in houses and apartments that were not safe and comfortable for me as a little person and a wheelchair user,” Cosma said during public comment. “The reason; there’s just not enough accessible housing. This is not a unique problem to me.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are more than 100,000 adult Detroiters with mobility disabilities alone.
“City records and plain old observation make it clear that we do not have 100,000 accessible housing units in the City of Detroit, not even close,” she said. “In fact, we have a major gap to fill if we want residents to be safe and if we want residents to age in place.”
Last August, HRD put out a report on housing accessibility needs and opportunities at the request of the Detroit City Council. The report notes that one in five Detroit residents live with a disability and 43% live below the poverty level.
HRD contracted Detroit Disability Power and The Kelsey, a national nonprofit advancing disability-forward housing, to conduct resident and housing stakeholder outreach and national best practices research. The report shows an array of features that can be incorporated into existing units to improve accessibility – zero-step entrances, wider doorways and hallways, roll-in showers, lower counter tops and lever-style handles.
The survey found that 60% of the 166 respondents had more than one disability and 50% stated that their homes did not meet accessibility needs. It also found cost was a barrier to making improvements. Property managers surveyed for the HRD study relayed significant differences in how they handle requests for accessibility modifications and that the formal process for residents seeking those types of changes was daunting.
Mahoney said the assessments will be done on a rolling basis and include walk-through visits to understand barriers for wheelchair access and for residents who have auditory or visual disabilities. Recommended changes could include lower-cost ramps, increased lighting and brighter colors or handrails as well as more costly, structural changes.
HRD invests federal entitlement funds from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development into affordable housing development and preservation projects.
To encourage more accessibility in housing developments, HRD has set minimum accessibility requirements for projects that use federal pass-through funds, which are double the federal requirements, Mahoney noted.
The city’s housing department also gives preference, in the form of additional points awarded in the competitive application process, for developments that offer at least 15% of units as accessible. He pointed to the Xavier Square project in Detroit’s Riverbend neighborhood as an example of a development with 14 fully accessible units.
Kaci Peller, a District 4 resident and policy manager for Detroit Disability Power, said during last week’s council meeting that HRD is working to include her organization and community members in the process with the consultants and they hope to go along on some of the site visits to learn from KMA.
“Then we’ll have a really clear picture as well of Detroit’s existing housing stock and we’ll know what we need by way of inclusive and accessible design and what the cost of that actually is, so that we can know what we need as far as funding to continue to meet that gap,” she said “That foundation is essential in planning how to increase accessible housing across the city.”
Detroit Disability Power representatives also uplifted Mary Mary Sheffield’s plan to build 1,000 new single-family homes in the city in four years.
Cosma said Sheffield’s plan is a bold opportunity to not only increase the housing stock but to also increase the number of accessible houses in Detroit, “giving residents with disabilities more options for safe places to live.”
“Of course, this only works if we build most or all of those 1,000 homes to be accessible,” she said.
