Rental Housing Preservation & Accessibility

How do you balance the need, or the desire, for rental housing preservation with the need for accessibility? Many of the older rental housing were built in an era where accessibility needs for persons with disabilities were poorly understood, and to rehab them for full, or even partial accessibility, would be quite expensive.

At what point do you say, "This is too expensive, so we should use the money elsewhere"?

Tags: Rental, accessibility, housing, preservation

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Bill Brauner on March 25, 2011 at 8:49am

Our experience in the Northeast is that most older projects can be adapted to make at least 5% of the units accessible at a reasonable cost. For high rise buildings this is generally not a major cost issue. Sometimes low rise buildings can be trickier, and I have seen some townhouse units converted to flats with an accessible first floor and a walkup second floor unit.

Clearly bringing older buildings, particularly elderly buildings, to full accessibility is a much bigger challenge. In one project now under construction in Mass., the developer is adding a new elevator tower to the outside of an old elderly building.

Even with accessibility upgrades, we still see preservation projects having a significantly lower development cost than new construction and adaptive rehab projects.

Permalink Reply by Brian Peters on March 25, 2011 at 9:26am

Thanks for the feedback-whats true of the Northeast most likely should be true of the Midwest, if not the rest of the country because of the higher number of older buildings in that region.