Accessibility as an element of suitable housing

In the previous post we talked about the problems of the elderly living in buildings without an elevator. This is far from the only problem that older people have in their homes, although the importance of these problems tends to be minimized or even made invisible. And as of what is not spoken, we do not know (or what is not named does not exist, said Lledó) today we are going to expand a little our knowledge of the residential situation of the elderly.

The situation of housing in Spain is so extremely complex (to put an adjective that doesn`t sounds badly) that when we talk about the problem of housing and the breach of the right to housing, we focus on the most pressing, most urgent, most visible problems, such as the access capacity of new homes or the economic overload it entails.

Undoubtedly there is a real concern behind: the price of housing in Spain, both in property and rent, leaves many homes out of the market and as we know has led to the increase in evictions (here also intervening abusive conditions of bank loans). Without affordable housing (economically) we can not make new homes, and this has catastrophic consequences at a social level. It influences different social phenomena, such as the delay and the reduction of the birth rate, which is just a determining factor of aging. It is paradoxical that so much effort is devoted to reducing the cost of pensions but that the other end of the balance and its positive balance are forgotten, such as facilitating maternity, for example, based on policies for access to housing. The example serves me to influence (again) that living more is not the only and exclusive reason for ageing, but, above all, that living more would be the positive part.

Returning to the issue, the residential situation of a country is telling us how its economy is running, how its public policies work and also informs us about the level of inequality that it experiences. I am aware that there are numerous measures to quantify these issues, but also that without adequate housing it is not possible to cover other basic rights.

When we put forward the idea of ​​the right to housing (this complex concept, more philosophical at times than endowed with real content, and which gives name to part of my postdoctoral project) we can sometimes forget that no housing is worth, that we do not refer to the mere availability of a roof, but that the housing must gather some suitable characteristics. That is, for the right to housing to be fulfilled, we must evolve to the conception of the right to adequate housing. The question therefore would be: Do older people live in suitable housing?

We tend to assume that this is the case, and that older people fulfill this premise of residing in suitable housing. This idea could derive from a logical argument: the life cycle should allow us to evolve and improve our situation, both economic and residential. For the most part, they do, but that does not mean that the housing situation is completely resolved. Nor should we forget that being better than we were in the past does not necessarily mean being well in the present.

We already saw that physical accessibility is a real problem. But it is not only because of the absence of an elevator, which is a very present problem in our society: almost 22% of the elderly live in buildings that have more than 3 floors and lack an elevator. As a friend told me after reading the previous post, there are older people who would be "kidnapped" in their homes without being able to go outside. If we analyze the accessibility of the buildings in which the elderly live, the situation is even worse.

First define accessibility: a building is accessible when a person in a wheelchair can access from the street to the inside of their homes without the help of another person (Glossary Census 2011). We can think of wheelchairs as something extreme, but if a wheelchair can not access it means we have steps or other architectural impediments. And that supposes a greater difficulty, not only for the people who help themselves of walkers or sticks, also for those that do not. We can not assume (we should not) that all elderly people need to use a wheelchair or walker, but these data are telling us that, even in those cases where there is an elevator, there may be access stairs to it. Or that the elevator, due to problems with the installation of the elevator, only reaches the intermediate plateaus, so we have a flight of stairs to climb to get home. Again, when we do not have mobility problems it may seem like a minor issue, but it could be isolating the older person in your home.

Well, by consulting the data (Population and Housing Census 2011, INE) we verify compliance with accessibility. As we can understand, and without age implies dependency (we saw it here) at older age we will have certain added difficulties related to our mobility (it costs us a little more to climb the steps, go, and it is normal). Then, when we analyze the distribution of the lack of accessibility we see that it gets worse as age increases: 67.4% of those over 75 reside in buildings with no accessibility and 7 out of 10 people over 85 years of age they reside in buildings with access problems. Even so, this is an improvement over ten years ago: in 2001, 78.9% of the 65+ population lived in buildings with a lack of accessibility, a figure that rose for those over 85 to 80.2% !

The housing situation has improved over time, but this type of problems that affect the structural characteristics of buildings are the most difficult to eradicate, because in many cases they do not depend on the decision capacity of the elderly, and can in addition, execution difficulties arise from the architectural point of view. But we need to reflect on how inclusive homes are in Spain: this problem of accessibility affects many people of all ages and prevents their integration into society.