Dear Editor,

You may not have thought about this – I didn’t, until it was brought to my attention by a fellow member of the Access Squad.

The issue here is that the new apartment buildings springing up like mushrooms on all the vacant lots in Shawville are not accessible by anyone with leg mobility conditions. The upstairs apartments have outside stairs, with a 90-degree turn at the top. A person who relies on a walker or wheelchair would not be able to go in and out, especially with groceries in hand. The ground floor apartments are fitted with 30” wide doors, and no common wheelchair or walker will fit through.

I don’t know the builder, but some readers of this paper may know who to contact to bring this matter to their attention. Those buildings already constructed would be difficult (read: expensive) to retrofit. The hope is that some of the buildings not yet framed might be fitted with wider doors on the ground floor apartments. Given the rapidity of the construction of the units, I suppose they are built to a firm plan, so any alterations would require advance redesign.

I know I’m asking a lot, but it’s not for my sake, nor for my several friends (with their completely functional legs) who are quite happy with the apartments they occupy there. But it’s all too easy to imagine how disease or injury could diminish that mobility, and then living in such an apartment would be impractical, if not impossible.

Robert Wills, Thorne and Shawville