“Just for You” and
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act

By Anne C. Woodlen

Here’s one for the books: The American’s with Disabilities Act does not cover housing. How’s that for a shocker? Disabled folks can get jobs and transportation under the ADA but we can’t get housing. How about that?

The reason I have come to know this is that I live in the only property in Onondaga County that is exclusively independent living for people with disabilities. Nice, you say? That’s what lots of folks say. They see our apartment building and they say, “Oh, that’s so nice. You have a place just for you.”

“Just for you.” When I moved to Syracuse in 1966, Syracuse realtors and/or banks engaged in red-lining. That was a practice whereby a red line was drawn around certain areas on the map and people of color could not get mortgages to buy property that was on the good side of the red line. In other words, black folks lived in areas that were “just for them.” It was called segregation, which is what I call the place where I live.

Healthy people are not allowed to live with us. We are restricted to living with “our own kind.” It is a 24-unit apartment building and half the tenants are in wheelchairs. My neighbors variously cannot see, hear, walk, talk, think or remember. We have cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, muscular dystrophy, spinal bifida and other disabilities too mixed and/or bizarre to retail. And we have to live with each other. And we don’t like it. Would you?

I tell people that for scary Halloween costumes, we should just strip naked. You want to see horror? Look at our twisted limbs and the places where body parts are missing. Look at the scars that climb our legs, stretch across our chests and cut across our throats. We are not a real fun crowd. We are your worst nightmare: damaged but alive.

Let me tell you one of the things that is absolutely crazy about this. Like any apartment building for able people, our staffing consists of one (1) manager and one (1) superintendent. They do regular management and superintending things like renewing leases and opening up plugged toilets. They do not do any special disability stuff.

This is intentional, proper and right—sort of. You see, the way the world works is that the more services you get, the more independence you give up. For example, Assisted Living Programs—ALP’s—in New York State will provide all kinds of things—meals, medications and showers, to name but a few. However, the catch is that your meals will be whatever the institution decides to serve you, and the medications will be delivered late and there’s nothing you can do about it, and your shower will be given by any strange or sullen aide the service decides to send. This is why some of us stubbornly choose independence wherein we can get what we want. Sort of.

So here’s the craziness: all our apartments have emergency pull cords in the bathroom and bedroom so we can call for help if we get in trouble. Guess who answers if a disabled person calls for help?

Another disabled person.

Smart, huh? There’s a woman who lives across the hall from me. She can’t get out of bed until her aide arrives to move her. Sometimes my neighbor drops her telephone under her bed. When she does, she pulls her emergency alarm. I answer for two reasons. First, I’m that kind of person. Second, I get to silence the screaming alarm. The problem is that I can’t get under her bed to retrieve the phone. I can’t get under my own bed to pick up things that I drop. I have to wait for my aide to come.

So we have this crazy situation where disabled people have only other disabled people to reach out to. Last year one of the disabled tenants had her able brother staying with her for a while. Boy, were we thrilled! He carried groceries, opened doors and moved furniture—a real neighborly kind of fellow—but he got his own place without us and we went back to our own peculiar anteroom to hell.

Here’s another problem: the management treats us like able people. The management company has about thirty properties in Onondaga County that are basically for elderly people, with a few disabled people scattered around. And neither our manager nor her supervisor have any training or experience with people with disabilities. This is like hiring a bus driver to fly an airplane: short-sighted, dangerous and categorically stupid.

The supervisor has explicitly stated that he makes decisions for our property “because that’s the way we do it everywhere else.” When asked to have a one-hour monthly meeting with the tenants to discuss problems, he said, “That’s what lawyers and courts are for.” Nice guy. He has absolutely no intention of developing a friendly working relationship with us.

HUD (U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development) holds the mortgage and, therefore, makes the rules, so I asked the Syracuse University Law School to help me sue HUD for segregation. After researching the question, they told me that what HUD is doing isn’t segregation because they are not trying to keep us away from other people. They are just keeping other people away from us, which is not against the law. S.U. Law advised me that there can be no judicial relief, only legislative.

Since this is not my week to climb Capitol Hill and lobby for a restructuring of housing legislation, I tried to file a complaint with HUD about the building management’s refusal to make reasonable accommodations, such as not placing tubs of geraniums so that they block wheelchair access to the outdoor water spigot. Is this not a reasonable request, I wonder?

HUD told me that they don’t take this kind of customer service complaint. They’ve hired an agency, CGI, to do it, so I called CGI and filed my complaints. CGI wrote me a letter basically saying that management can make up any policies it wants to. HUD doesn’t have to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.

Well, I think that’s a terrible violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, so I decide to file a complaint against the management company with the HUD Office of Civil Rights. I’ve been told that all federal departments have Offices of Civil Rights, but when I go to the HUD website, I can’t find any such office. Maybe I couldn’t find it because my multiple disabilities include a learning one, but I keep searching.

I click on something that takes me to the Dept. of Justice wherein I find a list of deputies and their phone numbers, so I pick a deputy at random and make the phone call, but first I put on my telephone headset, get a pen and legal pad, and go to the bathroom. I’ve been through this before. I’m going to get transferred through a lot of people before I get connected to the one who knows what to do.

I talk to somebody in the DOJ Disability Rights Section who transfers me to an ADA Specialist who says, “The ADA does not apply to housing.” Say what??? She gives me the phone number of somebody in the Fair Housing unit of HUD. We keep talking. Her name is Kristin and she’s a nice person. Among other things, she also tells me that the ADA does not apply to air travel; most people don’t know that. I for sure didn’t, and here I am living within eyeball distance of the east end of the runway.

Then Kristin tells me that what I need to do is file a Section 504 complaint. What is 504 a section of, I ask? She answers that it’s a section of the Rehabilitation Act, which actually predates the American’s with Disabilities Act. Every agency issues its own 504 regulations.

Wait a minute. You’re telling me to file a complaint about HUD with HUD? They’re going to investigate themselves? Hey, I wasn’t born yesterday. In fact, I was born so long ago that I was a grownup by the time Richard Nixon tried to pull that crap about investigating himself. But Kristin says, yes, this is the way it works. She gives me the phone number for the General Deputy Assistant Secretary of HUD.

Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee. These guys sure are impressed with themselves, aren’t they?

So I call the Gen. Dep. Ass. Sec. and get the Secretary’s secretary, whose voice mail says she will call me back tomorrow. Well I should certainly hope so.

Stay tuned to see if the Gen. Dep. Ass. Sec. is going to say to me, “Oh gosh. We’re being so mean, aren’t we? You’re right. I’ll run right out and change our policies. Thank you for bringing this to my attention—you sure are a nice lady.”

Back to the MarkBlum Report

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