The Torch Tours Atlanta

By Jacqueline Kravetz

Atlanta, GA (July 20, 2000) - The Spirit of the ADA Torch Relay touched down in Atlanta for a two-day celebration commemorating the tenth anniversary of the enactment of the Americans With Disabilities Act following the Relays first Georgia stop in Warm Springs.

With the involvement of over 100 torch bearers and hundreds more in the disability community, the Relay covered over fifteen miles, passing many of Atlantas major landmarks: The Carter Center, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center, the State Capitol, and City Hall, among other locations.

The Relay kicked off from the Shepherd Center, a specialty hospital and rehabilitation center for people with spinal cord injuries, acquired brain injuries, multiple sclerosis and other neurological disorders and urological problems.

Georgia gained notoriety for its institutionalization policies in a U.S. Supreme Court case, Olmstead vs. L.C., filed on behalf of two Georgia women with mental impairments who sought release from voluntary commitments to institutionalized treatment in exchange for care in community-based programs.

The case ended last week when the Supreme Court approved the states plan to provide mental health services in the community.

But it is in the capitol city where disability advocate Eleanor Smith has been chiseling out another model program for the disability community in her fight for accessible private housing . Smith founded Concrete Change, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to making all new homes in this country, and internationally "visit-able" in 1986.

A polio survivor, Smith has been in a wheelchair since the age of three and has lived in Georgia for the past twenty-five years.

In an interview at her home in a visitable East Lake community, Smith said she got the inspiration for creating universally accessible housing one day in 1985 while driving around Atlanta.

"What would keep these houses from having access other than the fact that they dontyou build your disabled houses for your disabled person, then all the rest of the houses have barriers but why?"

"It was just like the first time it really occurred to me and it didnt seem to have occurred to anyone else at the time," Smith said.

A visit-able home, a term copywritten by Concrete Change, is built deliberately with basic wheelchair access whether or not the designated resident has a disability. The logic behind the concept is to allow people with disabilities to move freely without barriers -- stairs and narrow doorways -- through all homes, as residents and as visitors.

Smith sees the disability movement as a political and social struggle that is virtually exactly the same as the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. "Most of the problems that come with the so called disability can be changed; the disability cant but the stuff that makes it disabling can," she said.

One example of what can be changed, Smith says, is private building practices. "I think the ADA should cover new housingjust the very basics, just the things that every mobility impaired person would need," Smith said.

Because of the efforts of Concrete Change, in 1992 Atlanta passed a city ordinance, the first US law of its kind, requiring basic wheelchair access in a variety of private, single-family homes. There are two features that make a home visitable, according to the Atlanta ordinance: at least one zero-step entrance, which can be located at the back, front or side; and interior passage doors, including bathrooms that are 32 inches.

This year, Georgia State Senator Vincent Fort led a successful effort to expand the major features of the Atlanta Ordinance into state law.

Smith, a former college professor, runs Concrete Change on a shoe string budget, volunteering her services to the effort she runs out of a home office.

"What Im trying to do is make a situation where a kid who has a disability who is five years old now will live in quite a different world housewise by the time hes twenty and hes just graduated from college and he or she is goi ng out to look for that first apartment," Smith said.

This coming August Concrete Change will host a visitability conference for 20 individuals from across the country who are working to make their cities visitable. The conference is dedicated to the exchange of ideas and how advocates can work together to help achieve a shift in private building policies.

As part of the Atlanta Relay route, the torch passed by fifteen of the over 500 "visit-able" homes in Atlanta.

Mark Johnson, a major force behind the national Relay concept and the Atlanta coordinator, explained the goals of Spirit of ADA and its original incarnation, Initiative 2000.

"The whole idea was to reach out to people who were isolated and connect folks with the intent of building communities and putting people in touch with each other so that they might have access to an infrastructure and then also to collective power.So what this is all about is building critical mass within the disability community," Johnson said.

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