It's My Turn to Relate My Apartment Hunt
posted by Fern Cohen at 11:10 PM on July 24, 2007

OK, now it's my turn. It must be apartment-hunting time.
I have to give up my apartment in Rego Park, Queens. In 2004, I was diagnosed with ALS/Lou Gehrig's Disease. In 2005, I spent $5,000 to have the tub ripped out to install a stall shower. But the time has come when I need a wheelchair to get into the bathroom, and the wheelchair doesn't fit.

So I am looking for an apartment in Manhattan, and it must be accessible. Well, nobody seems to know what "accessible" means. It means something roomy enough to move my motorized wheelchair around, and it means a bathroom door that is not half the size of the other doors. There are apartments built for the disabled, but the waiting-lists are 10 years long. We never think anything will happen to us like a disabling disease. But it does! It happened to me, and if you think the NYC rental market is tight, try looking for a decent-size studio or one-bedroom for under $2500/month with a bathroom and kitchen wide enough for a wheelchair!! I don't mean to play "let's top this" but with the population aging and living longer, and people like me surviving past the 2-5 years' life expectancy of an ALS patient, we really do need to make NYC more "accessible"!

http://nyc.metblogs.com/archives/200..._turn_to.phtml