Austin Passes Modest
“Visitability” Requirement for New
Houses
Should new private homes have to be accessible to disabled
visitors regardless of whether the owners themselves are
disabled?
That was the question roiling Austin, Texas, city council
meetings in June, after councilwoman Betty Dunkerley proposed
adding sweeping “visitability” requirements
to the city's code for new houses. Austin already requires that
city-sponsored housing include such accessibility features as
entry ramps, 32-inch interior doors, and lever hardware.
Dunkerley's proposal made those elemends a permit requirement
for any new house.
Opposition. Builders objected that
the idea was too broad and would burden private homeowners who
might never have a disabled visitor — while doing
nothing for disabled persons actually living in existing spaces
without accessible details. And although Dunkerley had cited a
$300 construction cost figure, builders told a different tale:
Greater Austin HBA vice president Harry Savio informed the
council that one HBA member, production builder D.R. Horton,
expected architect fees alone — for redrawing the
dozens of plans Horton builds in Austin — to run as
high as $250,000.
Even supposedly modest changes like upsizing a bathroom door
can have a ripple effect on an affordable house's tight floor
plan, pointed out Habitat for Humanity designer Lee Doar in a
phone interview. One of her own one-story plans, for instance,
has three baths — a main bathroom with a 3-foot door,
plus a half bath and a powder room with 24-inch doors. The
proposed rule required minimum 32-inch doors for all three.
“I would have to enlarge the shower room to get the 32
inches,” said Doar. “And I would have to make
the powder room even smaller, and eliminate storage or
something — I haven't figured out how I could make
that work.”
Final Measure. In the end, the
council passed a sharply scaled-back measure requiring that one
first-floor bath have a 30-inch door and be framed with wall
blocking to allow future installation of grab bars. Members
authorized a task force to develop a voluntary, incentive-based
program incorporating the rest of the requirements in
Dunkerley's proposal.
Savio says the HBA plans to focus on the task force.
“A third of our new housing already complies with the
existing visitability program” because the units are
supported by city incentives, he says, which hasgiven
association members a wealth of insight: “We have a
lot of folks with a lot of experience who can provide stories,
examples, plans, and photos.”
As advocates for the disabled, the Austin
American-Statesmen reported that many left the final
meeting disappointed. Nevertheless, the new rule marks the
first time a U.S. municipality has made any accessibility
features a permit requirement for private single-family homes.
— Ted Cushman
Offcuts
- Centex, KB Home, Pulte Homes, and MDC Holdings
— the parent company of Richmond American Homes
— have been fined a total of nearly $3.5 million
for failing to prevent silt-laden runoff from 2,202
construction sites, the EPA and the Justice Department
announced in June. The violations took place from 2001 to
2005 in 34 different states; California, Florida, Texas,
Arizona, and Nevada had the most violations. The action
against the companies is part of a nationwide effort by the
EPA to prevent stormwater violations at construction
sites.
- Localities in Florida and elsewhere have begun levying
fines on mortgage companies that allow repossessed homes to
degrade, reports the New York Times. This has led
to a boom in so-called mortgage service companies, which
inspect, repair, and maintain the unwanted homes. One
company president interviewed by the paper predicted robust
growth. “We still have two million more people
that need to go through this process,” she was
quoted as saying. “That’s like the entire
town of Tampa going through foreclosure.” The
paper also notes that nearly 3 percent of previously
owner-occupied homes were vacant in March, up from less
than 2 percent in 2005 — the highest figure since
the Census Bureau began keeping track in 1956.
- A roofing crew using a torch to soften asphalt shingles
was responsible for a costly Memorial Day fire at
Hollywood’s Universal Studios, according to
The Associated Press. The 12-hour blaze destroyed
two blocks of a faux New York brownstone streetscape, as
well as the studio’s King Kong attraction and the
courthouse square from the 1985 hit movie Back to the
Future.
- How do you move a lot of unsold houses fast? Michael
Crews Development, a San Diego–based residential
builder, is taking an approach more commonly associated
with pizza or fast-food sales: Buyers of one of the
company’s $1.6 to $1.8 million “estate
homes” in an Escondido gated community will
receive a second house (valued at $399,900, according to
the company) in a nearby townhouse development free.
Breadsticks and a large soda apparently are not
included.
- Bosch has announced the
recall of 9,700 half-inch hammer drills because of a
defective trigger: The drill may continue to operate after
the trigger’s released. The model 1191VSR hammer
drills were sold nationwide from July 2007 through April
2008. For more information, contact Bosch Tools at
877/472-0007 or go to
boschtools.com.
Pneumatic Nailer
Triggering Has Little Effect on Speed, Study Finds
A growing body of research suggests that framing and
sheating with a pneumatic nailer set to contact-trip mode is at
least twice as dangerous as working with a sequentially
triggered gun (see “Pneumatic Nailers Under Fire
Again,”
In The News, 7/08). Still, it's long
been an article of faith among carpenters that bump-nailing is
the faster method. And a recent study of experienced carpenters
appears to confirm that belief: Sequential nailing —
which requires the user to squeeze the trigger for each
individual fastener — is indeed somewhat slower.
However, the overall difference in speed turns out to be
surprisingly small.
In the study — summarized in the July/August issue of
Public Health Reports — 10 journeyman
carpenters, working individually, each framed and sheathed two
precut hip-roofed 8-by-10-foot sheds, once with a
contact-triggered nailer and once with a sequentially triggered
tool. Half worked with the sequential nailer first, and half
with the contact nailer first. All 20 projects were recorded on
videotape, and the tape was broken down to determine how much
time the participants — who had been told to work at a
normal pace — actually spent nailing. (Time spend
handling and positioning material was excluded.)
Analysis of the tapes showed that the mean amount of time
spent nailing came to 92.8 minutes per shed for the
contact-triggered tool and 103.0 minutes for the
sequential-fire gun — a ten percent difference in
favor of bump-nailing. But when layout, cutting, and handling
time were included, the disparity fell to 0.77 percent of the
mean 1,298 minutes spent on each shed.
Although all of the participants were experienced residential
carpenters, there was a substantial difference in speed from
one individual to the next. Sequential- and contact-triggered
nailing times for three of the 10, for example, varied by less
than three minutes, while the times of three others varied by
20 minutes or more. So how much of that variability was due to
the type of nailer used and how much to the carpenters
themselves? After conducting a statistical analysis, the
study's authors concluded that slightly more than two-thirds of
the variability in speed could be attributed to differences
among carpenters and one-third to other factors, including
trigger types. In other words, speed of nailing seems to depend
less on the tool used than on the person using it.
Finally, the researchers also found that the type of nailer
had little effect on the quantity of nails used, which ranged
from 1,022 to 1,368 per shed. Missed nail placements for the
two trials were also quite close, with a mean of 25 misses per
shed assembled with contact nailers, and 22 per shed with
sequential-trip tools. As you might expect, though, practice
did make a difference, with carpenters using a mean of 30 more
nails to assemble their first shed than their second,
regardless of trigger type. — Jon
Vara