Accessibility Woes

Last night, in a fit of wild hopefulness, I decided to take a quick peek at the local real estate market to get an idea of how many ranch floorplans are for sale, and what their prices are lately.  We're not actually ready to start seriously shopping for a new home yet, there's still things that have to be done to ours and strategy that has to be planned with our realtor before we re-list our townhome for sale, but I wanted to just give myself an exciting little taste of what's available.

What I got instead was a bad taste in my mouth.  First of all, unlike when we were searching for homes in 2012 and 2013, I couldn't find any real estate website that would effectively and accurately let me limit my search to only ranch-style, single-story homes, so I had to sift through lots of results that were completely impossible for me to live in.  Secondly, from what I could identify in the search results, there are even fewer single-story homes available than we had to choose from previously.  Accessibility has never been a great priority of builders, this isn't exactly news to me, but I find it increasingly frustrating that there are so few homes available to match my dream of having everything I need on the ground floor with me.

If money were no object, I would just buy a plot of vacant land and hire an architect to design the perfect accessible house with the 4 bedrooms we need so that someday our twins can stop sharing a room, with a basement for tornado warnings but laundry on the main floor.  It would have plenty of kitchen cabinet space and a master bathroom with a tub I can put a shower chair in, plus grab bars.  There would be at least one full garage spot, where we would park the wheelchair accessible vehicle of my dreams, and we would all live happily ever after.

But of course, for anyone with disabilities, money is usually quite an object.  I'm scared to even find out what it would cost to actually hire an architect, much less proceed from there to actual construction.  We don't have the knack for winning lottery jackpots, apparently, and short of that I don't see any custom building in our future.  Maybe someday more housing developments will consider the needs of people with disabilities.  I used to work in the construction industry and I know that the ADA has (forcefully) helped bring about more accessibility awareness and availability in multi-family homes and apartment/condo construction, but I've yet to really see it be a consideration in single-family developments.  We've been a marginalized group that architects have groaned about accommodating for too long, and from the teeth-rattling cobblestone/brick sidewalks in shopping centers to the universally inaccessible obsession with 1.5 story, 2 story, and various split-level home styles, modern construction needs a complete overhaul that embraces and celebrates the United States' largest minority group:  persons with disabilities.

This is not a beautiful sidewalk. 

It is the most painful kind of sidewalk 

I've ever wheeled over.