Accessible housing issues

[ijmorlan]

If we took your point to its logical conclusion, we would require every house, including single detached houses, to have an elevator

This is a pretty crummy slippery slope you are arguing. Equating a single home dwelling with limited accessibility options to a multi-unit building with limited accessibility options is disingenuous. An apartment building is not a private residence, it is a commercial entity. No one is arguing that all individual units must be accessible, only that access to them must be.

“it is a commercial entity” … whose costs, capital and ongoing, are paid for entirely by its occupants (plus some profit to the owner, without which the building would not have been built and would therefore have no occupants). A building with 6 apartments and an elevator has 6 households sharing the cost of the elevator. I’m pretty sure most people, and especially most people of limited means, can think of plenty of more valuable uses for their money than buying and maintaining 1/6 of an elevator.

I already admitted that a larger building (not going to say a specific exact size, but definitely including anything with a dozen apartments per floor) should have an elevator. The only question is how small you take it. Anyway, a rental townhouse development is “a commercial entity”. Does that mean the townhouses should have elevators? Or more precisely, does that mean the occupants of the townhouses should be required to pay for elevators? Should basement apartments be illegal if they don’t have level entry?

It’s easy to say everybody should have stuff; it’s a lot harder to actually provide housing for people, especially when there are all sorts of people adding on requirements without which the project may not proceed.