It’s not easy to find a new home. The place needs to feel comfortable, warm, with good ambience and a little feng shui. When you use a wheelchair there’s a whole extra checklist — not to make it feel like home, but just to make it possible to live in. It can make finding a place much harder and, unfortunately, more expensive. Even worse, laws around accessible housing requirements don’t do many favors for us rollin’ folk. So it takes some work to find good housing, and with some systemic changes, things could be much better all-round.

I learned about the housing conundrum the hard way when I finished college. During school I was lucky — in freshman year I was in a wheelchair-accessible dorm, and from sophomore year onward I lived in a 56-person student co-op. The place was as big as a large fraternity, with hardwood across the entire ground level. I had my own bedroom and bathroom with a roll-in shower, and there were auto door openers on the main entrance and my bedroom. The overall accessibility was top-notch, but I took it for granted. That’s why having trouble finding an accessible place after college caught me so off guard.

I gave myself a couple months to look around, but really it wasn’t enough. The checklist was huge: ground-level or with a ramp or elevator, 32-inch wide doors, hardwood floors, at least a two bedroom, ideally with my own bathroom (since my morning routine takes so long), and a big enough bedroom that I can actually move my wheelchair around. Plus the big accessibility issues; mainly, auto-door openers and a roll-in shower, or at least something that I could remodel using funds from my savings. It was a pretty daunting list, and I knew it would limit my options — and probably jack up my rent in the end.

The more I looked around, the more I worried. The only options in town that worked were newer buildings, and with East Bay rent a two bed/two bath was over $3,000 a month. Without many choices and closing in on the end of my lease, I signed on to live in a one-year-old apartment at $3,250 — which ended up being around $1,750 for my half, since I had the master bedroom. It fit most of my requirements: wide enough doors, an elevator, a large enough bedroom and bathroom, and the ability to have hardwood in the unit (at a slightly higher monthly rent than with carpet). I was happy with the place, and lucky that I was earning enough to get by with the price.

A couple things were missing, though. Neither the downstairs nor apartment doors had auto openers, the hardwood up-charge only covered the living room, and the bathroom had a big fat tub. And as I found out, the laws around accessibility are total mess. It turns out that a landlord can’t prevent a tenant for making any “reasonable modifications” to their home, but the landlord doesn’t have to pay for any of it. That even applies to building-wide mods: so legally, a tenant could be made to fork up $5,000 for a ground-level auto opener that serves every tenant! (It actually took some serious conversations with the landlord to get them to cover that one, no joke). In all, my bathroom remodel was nearly $20k and an auto door opener was $2k. And check this one out: hardwood in the living room was a $100/month upcharge, but instead of doing $50 extra for hardwood in the bedroom, the landlord counted the $3k flooring job as an “accessibility modification” that I covered up-front (which, spread over my hopefully-10-years there, will pay off).

It ended up being $25,000 in accessibility modifications that were ultimately investments in somebody else’s property. Now, since I’m planning on staying there for as long as possible, it’ll work out to a couple hundred dollars a month in the long-run, so big-picture it’s not horrendous. And that might actually be what a landlord could charge extra given the demand for accessible units — but the morality around me being forced to pay up-front is kind of twisted.

But the more I thought about it, looking at it from the landlord’s perspective — as a businessperson — and given current laws and regulations, it’s hard to blame them for not covering the remodel. Why would they agree to paying $25,000 or modifications that might only be needed for a year, if I choose to move and a nondisabled person moves in next? Plus, they could still rent the room out for the same amount if I chose not to sign the lease. The incentives and regulations just don’t line up, which means we need systemic change. Especially because there are plenty more people in my situation, and plenty more without the ability to cover the costs (which I recognize I am very lucky to be).

This is part one in a two-part series that Alex Ghenis has written on accessible housing. Look for the next segment, which deals with the bigger picture of getting more of the housing stock accessible, next week.