Visitability Housing Benefits
- A “visitable” house enables someone who has an ambulatory difficulty to enter and navigate the living area of the main floor of a residence. It has:
- One zero-step or low-slope entrance,
- Doorways at least 32” wide, and
- A usable half-bathroom on the first floor.
- more than 90 percent of housing units in the United States are inaccessible for a person with a disability(Smith, Rayer, & Smith, 2008)
- By 2024, it is estimated that Ohio may have 5 million residents with ambulatory difficulties.
- Houses with well-designed visitable features can benefit that population as well as injured veterans, the public, and the state.
- They can enhance independence and care-giving,
- lower costs incurred due to falls and injuries,
- lower Medicaid costs by allowing home care, and
- minimize tax expenditures by not requiring people to move to a nursing home or long-term care facility.
- (Maisel, Smith, & Steinfeld, 2008).
- developers complain about a lack of consumer demand for visitable units, stigma associated with visitable features, and higher costs associated with building such houses.
- respondents:
- Preferred to buy the houses with a visitable feature; and
- Thought houses with visitable features would sell faster than houses lacking such features.
- Builders, developers, and designers with experience with visitable houses estimated the cost in new construction as:
- Less than one percent of the construction cost; and
- $3,180.00 less than the cost of retrofitting a house to make it visitable.
- All three surveys found that each visitable feature improved livable qualities, such as:
- Access
- Aesthetics
- Resale value
- Ease of moving in or out or moving furniture
- The benefits of visitable features to consumers and the state, their relative low cost, and consumer demand for them all suggest that Ohio can benefit from offering incentives to encourage the construction of visitable units.
- Universal design (Maisel et al., 2008) applies to commercial properties as well as residential ones whereas visitability applies only to residences.
- In seeking to make a house visitable, it differs from designs for accessibility or for aging-in-place, both of which have more features throughout the building and site (Maisel 2011).
- Visitability represents a baseline and cost-effective approach for design and planning policy (Maisel et al., 2008). Like universal design, visitability stems from the view that barriers in the built environment disable people by making it harder for them to carry out their daily activities (Maisel, et al., 2008).
- Builders of visitable homes have reported that visitable houses sold as quickly as non-visitable ones (Maisel et al., 2008). Through interviews, researchers learned that in apartment buildings with visitable and non-visitable units, the visitable units rented out first.
- government requirements have had more success than voluntary programs in increasing the number of visitable housing units (Smith et al., 2008).