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Comment by usaar333 | Hacker News Reader

ADA already forces decisions to be made contrary to environmental concerns. Added construction being a key one.

IMO, ADA is a great example of overbearing government regulation. It doesn't leave much room for "reasonable" accommodations and dictates solutions. (Case in point, my condo building can't use a portion of trash rooms as recycle storage, which gives large environmental benefits, because of wheelchair accessibility rules.. but why does this matter on floors where wheelchair bound residents don't live?)

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Many people with disabilities who actually rely on protections afforded under the ADA would disagree with you. The ADA actually requires employers and other public places to make reasonable accommodations: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-...

Regarding your condo building: separate is never equal. Requiring people with disabilities to only live on certain floors is discriminatory. Disability is perhaps the only minority that anyone can enter into at any time, through no action of their own. You can't say that you don't need to worry about accessibility of floors where there are no wheelchair users, because you can't predict who could need one in the future, when or why they will need one.

It is perfectly acceptable for an apartment building to have accessible and non accessible units. The ADA isn’t that crazy, which is why wheel chair bars are probably not in your bathroom.

I'm not disagreeing with you there, the term "accessible" has a wide range. But it would be inappropriate for a building to have some units with e.g. steps and some without. I'm not sure what you been by wheelchair bars, but if you mean handle bars my building accommodates those through a reasonable accommodation request although I have lived in buildings before which had them in every unit.

It would be completely appropriate, and in fact that’s what happens. We had to turn down a nice one bedroom in a new downtown Bellevue building because it was a split level with a walk down (and we have a toddler so....). Most of the units were not like that, and this one was cheaper as a result.

The fact that people consider it 'added' rather than the bare minimum is partly why the ADA is prescriptive. Also, because it would be incredibly burdensome for someone with a disability to have to figure out how each building does their 'accommodations'.

> why does this matter on floors where wheelchair bound residents don't live?

Because residents aren't the only people who could be using that trash room. Because a resident could be injured while living there.

I think it's weird how the default experience is apparently to be exclusionary.

Right, I agree on the intention of ADA. But buildings should be allowed to make reasonable tweaks.

My building was built before recycles and computer became a huge thing. Trash room only has a trash shoot. To dispose compost, I need to take an elevator 30 floors down to dispose compost, which takes a lot of time.

If the building could allocate a third of trash rooms to store recycles, rotate them if a resident became disabled, we'd be in a situation where able bodied people are better off and disabled people are no worse off. Instead ADA is too restrictive, so we're in a suboptimal spot

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