Five-year-old Beau starts each day being carried by one of his parents to the family's living room, where his wheelchair awaits in their Beamsville, Ont., home.
Five-year-old Beau starts each day being carried by one of his parents to the family's living room, where his wheelchair awaits in their Beamsville, Ont., home.
“These are all things that he absolutely could do on his own if the house could accommodate him,” she said.Amid a housing crisis that has Canadian policymakers and developers scrambling to bolster supply, those living with disability are urging leaders to enshrine accessibility into more newly built homes than the country has historically seen.“We want our son to be able to access everything he needs.
“There's a housing crisis for everyone, but the housing crisis is so much more intense for anyone requiring accessible housing because the lack of supply is exponentially more scarce." All levels of government have a role to play in spurring more accessible housing, whether through changes to building code requirements or financial incentives tied to grants, said Stephanie Cadieux, the federal government’s chief accessibility officer.
Cadieux said there is an enormous opportunity to change the face of accessible housing across Canada at this moment, particularly as the federal government targets 3.87 million new homes by 2031.“It's proven over and over again that it's far more costly to fix something after the fact when it comes to accessibility than it is to do it at the beginning.”
The Daniels Corp. is a developer in the Greater Toronto Area that has taken up that call through its Accessibility Designed Program. First unveiled in 2017, the builder set out to create accessibly designed homes for people using mobility devices at no additional cost. “It was really these types of features and often finishes that we looked at , ‘OK, if we can make some of these enhancements from the very beginning ... rather than trying to bolt it on later, can we be more responsive to the needs of the accessibility community?’”
A government report released in the summer said feedback from stakeholders consistently highlighted that greater accessibility must be an essential feature of the design catalogue.
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