Transcript for Visitability: Building Today's Housing for Tomorrow
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February 23, 2021 TXGCPD. ****************DISCLAIMER!!!**************** THE FOLLOWING IS AN UNEDITED ROUGH DRAFT TRANSLATION FROM THE CART PROVIDER'S OUTPUT FILE. THIS TRANSCRIPT IS NOT VERBATIM AND HAS NOT BEEN PROOFREAD. THIS IS NOT A LEGAL DOCUMENT. THIS FILE MAY CONTAIN ERRORS. THIS TRANSCRIPT MAY NOT BE COPIED OR DISSEMINATED TO ANYONE UNLESS PERMISSION IS OBTAINED FROM THE HIRING PARTY. SOME INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN MAY BE WORK PRODUCT OF THE SPEAKERS AND/OR PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS AMONG PARTICIPANTS. HIRING PARTY ASSUMES ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR SECURING PERMISSION FOR DISSEMINATION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT AND HOLDS HARMLESS TEXAS CLOSED CAPTIONING FOR ANY ERRORS IN THE TRANSCRIPT AND ANY RELEASE OF INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN. ***********DISCLAIMER!!!************ >> Turner: Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to the Accessibility and Disability Policy Webinar series. My name is Randi Turner and I'm the accessibility and disability rights coordinator with the Governor's Committee on People with Disabilities. Today's focus is visitability, building today's housing for tomorrow. Participants' microphones will be turned off during the session so please make note of the webinar tool bar where you will see the Q&A icon. This is where you will submit questions. Questions will be answered during the session and Susan is going to have to leave us when her piece is done so to make sure she's going to start us out so make sure you submit questions for Susan as they come up during the session and she will answer them when her piece is complete. If there is information to share with the audience, we will use the chatbox, but please don't respond in the chatbox because that makes it difficult to monitor -- monitor a couple of different areas. The webinar will be recorded and will be posted to our YouTube channel. Training materials and the realtime captioning transcript will be made available to all participants after the session. In a moment we'll begin recording and then I'll repeat some of this information, but quickly before we start the Governor's Committee is composed of telephone individuals. Seven of whom must be people with disabilities. We also have officials from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. Texas Health and Human Services Commission. Texas Education Agency. The Workforce Commission. The Department of Licensing and Regulation. And the Texas State Independent Council that serve as non-voting, advisory, ex-officio members. We have a staff of five that serve as a central resource here in the office. So I will begin recording in just a moment. And you will hear me repeat the very beginning of this so that it's on the recording. >> Turner: Good afternoon and welcome to the Accessibility and Disability Policy Webinar series. My name is Randi Turner and I am the Accessibility and Disability Rights Coordinator with the Governor's Committee on People with Disabilities. Today's focus is visitability, building tomorrow's housing for -- I'm sorry, building today's housing for tomorrow. And we're going to start off with Susan Barr. Susan, can you take us away? >> Barr: Yes, thank you, Randi. Thank you all for attending today. My name is Susan Barr and I am the manager of residential plan review with the City of Austin in the development services department. Just a quick disclaimer here about this presentation, this presentation is for the City of Austin's visibility ordinance number 20140130-021, which only applies to certain private residential projects. An accessible house presumes that a person with a disability will live in unit, while a visitable house provides the ability to visit it and is more adaptable for future need. Also, the Americans with disability act, which only applies to commercial, public and governmental buildings, is not covered in this presentation. So give you a quick outline of the presentation, we'll be going over a brief history of the City of Austin's history and background of accessible code requirements and then we'll also be going over the components of the 2014 ordinance which has interior and exterior requirements, an ability to waive out of the exterior requirements and then what needs to be submitted. So the history and background. There have been provisions for providing some type of accessibility inside the new construction of a single-family dwelling or duplex residence since the early 1980s. The requirements were limited to a 30-inch clear opening with two by six minimal lateral wall reinforcement at 34 inches from and parallel to the interior floor finish. And then Randi, could you click one more time? And then this gives you a visual of kind of what that looks like. So the dashed lines show the two by six blocking that needs to be provided and then a 32-inch wide door will provide a 30-inch clear opening. As we are living longer there is a growing need to expand upon the existing regulations, allowing for better access into and around a home. So that more people can age in place. So the components to the ordinance, there are seven of them. And the first one is applicability and then the second, counseling and guidance required at plan review. Third, visitable bathrooms, fourth, visitable light switches, receptacles and environmental controls. Fifth visitability bathroom route. The sixth is visitability dwelling entrance. And the seventh is the exterior visitable route. One thing I would like to mention is that the first six were effective on December -- I'm sorry, were effective on February 10th of 2014. And then the last one, the exterior visitable route, was not effective until July 1st of 2015. That gave people a pretty good time frame to get used to the requirements and especially for the exterior visitable route. So applicability. So a permit for construction of a new single-family or duplex dwelling with ha bitable space on the first floor must be designed and constructed as a visitable dwelling in compliance with the requirements of section R 320. The requirements of the section are limited to new construction and do not apply to remodels or additions. So what we're looking at here, on the left-hand side is we have a carport and then a storage utility room and a carport. Since that storage utility room is not habitable, visitability does not need to be provided on that first floor. However, looking at the floor plan on the right, the space between the carports is a media room and because that is -- so because it is habitable, then a half bathroom does need to be provided and that space does need to be visitable. So the compliance required at plan review needs to be done by a survey -- prepared by a registered design professional or other professional designing with all requirements of the section. So first we need a survey from a certified land surveyor and then the plan documentation needs to be done by an architect or a certified building designer. So when we're -- the next item is the visitable bathroom. So a visitable dwelling must be designed and constructed with at least one bathroom group or half bath on the first floor that meets the following requirements: There must be a minimum clear opening of 30 inches, like we mentioned before, a lateral two by six or larger nominal wood blocking installed flush with the stud edges of the bathroom walls. And then that center line of the blocking must be 34 inches from and parallel to the interior floor level, except for the portion of the wall located directly behind the lavatory. And we have a couple of images to show you here. So this is that similar -- that same floor plan that we were looking at earlier and you can see that the dashed line stops at the lavatory because you do not need to provide blocking behind the lavatory and then our next image that we have is actual -- from actual construction site. So that is showing the two by six blocking at 34 inches to the center line that's flush with the studs. The next item is the visitable light switches, receptacles and environmental controls. So the first floor of a visitable dwelling must meet the following requirements. The light switches and environmental controls must be no higher than 48 inches above the interior floor level and outlets and receptacles must be a minimum of 15 inches above the interior floor level except for outlets and receptacles. We have a couple of images to show. On the left we have the construction drawing, elevation, interior elevations, indicating those locations, and then on the right we have actual images from construction sites. So as you can see the outlet on the left is above the 15 inches and then on the right the outlets or the light switches actually are at 45 inches. So those both meet the code requirements. So the fifth item is the visitable bathroom route. So bathroom group or half baths designated for visitability have a route of a minimum of 32 inches at the visitable entrance and continuing through the living room, dining room and kitchen and be level with ramped or beveled changes at door thresholds. So what we have here on the left is showing the visitable route going through all those spaces and it also indicates where the visitable bathroom is. And then the next image -- and there is an exception. It's -- the exception is the visitable route is not on an area with a split-level or sunken floor provided an alternative route is available.