David Carlson: Look for the welcoming solutions to the problems

More than 30 years ago, the overwhelmingly bipartisan Americans with Disabilities Act was passed with our local Rep. Tom Foley at the helm of the House. President George H.W. Bush heralded the historic civil rights law in a signing ceremony on the south lawn of the White House. With the fall of the Berlin Wall fresh in the public’s mind, the president described the legislation as taking a “sledgehammer to another wall, one which has for too many generations separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse, but not grasp” and proclaimed that Americans will not tolerate discrimination, and that the “shameful wall of exclusion” would finally come tumbling down.

The ADA is far from perfect, as many people have been systemically excluded from benefiting from its civil rights protection, but it has led to a generation of designers and builders creating public spaces that welcome people with disabilities. New construction provides ramps if there is a change in grade and doorways are wide enough to roll a wheelchair through. You may not have noticed that doors in public buildings now have levers instead of knobs as they are easier to turn for people with arthritis or without fingers. And did you know that all elevators now have different tones for when a car is traveling up versus traveling down so someone with a vision disability can decide if they want to step onto the elevator when the doors open? All of these advancements in our built environment reflect the policy position of the ADA to build community spaces that welcome people with disabilities.

Earlier this month I was saddened to see that the city departed from this welcoming philosophy. Spokane’s solution for addressing the number of people who seek shelter under a local railroad overpass is to employ hostile architecture to get them to leave the area, not find ways to welcome our community members into even better housing options than an overpass.

Hostile architecture is when an area or feature is designed to make people want to go somewhere else or not use the space in a particular way. For example, it could be small things like the dividers you often find on benches to prevent people from laying down, or spikes on random flat surfaces to prevent people from sitting on them. Or it could be something like the last major city hostile architecture project – the $150,000 worth of rocks that were dumped under Interstate 90 in 2017 to prevent people from camping and otherwise congregating under the freeway.

The city officials behind the current hostile architecture even had the gall to sell their actions as a move to make the city more welcoming. Erecting a cyclone fence to prevent people with mental illness, substance use disorder, or others without much money from getting out of the falling snow or blazing sun is as hostile as you can get with architectural choices, not welcoming.

I am not saying what was done here necessarily violates the letter of the ADA, but it certainly runs against the spirit of the law. There is ADA guidance about the width of hallways, the diameter of grab bars, and location of toilet paper rolls to address the innumerable ways spaces should be easily accessible to people with physical or sensory disabilities, but there are no explicit provisions in that detailed guidance addressing whether you can build a fence with the expressed purpose of excluding people with behavioral disabilities. The spirit of exclusion expressed by the fences on Browne Street run counter to the welcoming spirit of the ADA that the first President Bush compared to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. It is mean-spirited and pushes people out of sight and out of mind.

I ask administrators, policy makers and my fellow neighbors to check their initial impulses if they come up with a hostile architectural solution to a problem. The fact you are seeing a problem in need of a solution is great, but pause and look instead for the welcoming solution. The bipartisan solution. The Speaker Foley and President H.W. Bush solution. A solution where everyone can and should be welcome. The welcoming solutions are there, but they take a bit more thought, skill and effort. The extra work is worth it, though, because the problem is fixed, not just swept under the rug. Ultimately, by finding the welcoming solution you get to do good and be good – and isn’t that better than the alternative?

David Carlson is a Spokane-area attorney and director of advocacy for Disability Rights Washington, the federally mandated protection and advocacy system for people with disabilities living in Washington state.