Reasonable accommodation in the rehabilitation of housing estates: application to barrio Montserrat in Terrassa (Barcelona)

Abstract

The introduction of reasonable accommodation to facilitate universal accessibility in residential buildings has become crucial since the publication of the Law 8/2013 of June 26 on rehabilitation, regeneration and urban renewal. The complexity and cost of these processes is not easily combined with attention to the functional and dimensional requirements that people with disabilities and other groups with functional limitations require.

This article addresses this dilemma through reviewing the case of improving accessibility in the housing blocks of Barrio Montserrat in Terrassa, Barcelona, representative of many cheap housing estates constructed in the 50, 60 and 70 in Spain. A descriptive analysis of urban and building conditions in the neighborhood is performed through field analysis and comparison of the accessibility conditions to those required by the Spanish Building Code.

Stipulating what accommodations are legally considered as reasonable requires not only reviewing its technical feasibility, but knowing which elderly and disabled persons live in the building, residents' income levels and financial possibilities in order to pay for the necessary adaptations. All these conditions are studied for a Montserrat neighborhood block in order to discuss the applicability of reasonable accommodation, as established by Law 8/2013, to cases where the cost of accessibility intervention is very high in proportion to disposable income of residents.