Disabled people share experience of accessible homes
The survey was carried out by Inclusion London, which represents deaf and disabled organisations.
One respondent, Abbi Brown, who uses a wheelchair, said although her current flat was largely accessible, her garden was hard to get into due to an "enormous and very difficult step".
City Hall said the Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan had allocated £100m to deliver more accessible homes for disabled Londoners.
The report found one in four respondents with accessibility needs could not safely and easily use basic facilities like kitchens, bathrooms and entryways.
It also discovered that only 3% of current new-build housing in London was visitable for a disabled person with a mobility impairment.
Nearly two in three respondents said they had made cutbacks on food and other essentials to be able to afford housing.
Ms Brown said the adaptations in her home, which range from making the doorways "wide enough for me to get my wheelchair through" to putting sockets higher up and light switches lower down, "make a big difference to my day to day life".
But even then she said her home was still not fully accessible, like many adapted flats, because she struggled to get in and out of her garden due to an "enormous and very difficult step to get out into it".
Ms Brown had to wait for a home like her current one to become available in the capital, meaning she previously had to live somewhere less suitable for her needs.
She said she was trapped in her previous Bethnal Green flat for days after one of the lifts broke down, and said she was "made to feel it (was) my fault".
"Housing is not an isolated issue. Housing needs to be considered in the context of transport and streetscapes and public infrastructure," she explained.
"I can't get into, I would say, 90% of the shops and restaurants in this area.
"If you can't easily get down the street, you can't access the Tube station, then it doesn't really matter that your house is accessible because it is essentially a beautiful prison."
Local and national decision makers are now being urged to work together to build more accessible homes, especially ones for social rent.
Tracey Lazard, chief executive officer at Inclusion London, said the low percentage of accessible new homes being built in the capital was "shocking" and was "condemning disabled people now to live lives of, frankly, misery".
She added: "We talk a lot about future proofing and resilience and critical to that has to be about building homes that people can live in throughout their entire lives."
A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: "The mayor is committed to meeting London's diverse housing needs and has allocated more than £100m in funding to deliver well-designed, supported housing to enable disabled Londoners to live independently and access appropriate care.
"The mayor also requires a minimum percentage of accessible and adaptable units in all new housing developments funded by his Affordable Homes Programme, helping to build a fairer and better London for everyone."
Listen to the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to hello.bbclondon@bbc.co.uk
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Hamilton Spectator
7 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Review: In Gary Shteyngart's bittersweet novel ‘Vera, or Faith,' a Russian Korean girl comes of age in an American dystopia
It's hard to be a 10-year-old girl. This is especially true if you're Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, a Russian Korean child navigating the intricacies of playground politics amid rising fascism in America. In Gary Shteyngart's latest novel, 'Vera, or Faith,' the young, precocious Vera lives in Manhattan with her Jewish Russian father ('Daddy'), a struggling magazine editor preoccupied with cultural capital, and her Protestant New England stepmother ('Anne Mom'), a liberal housewife who spends her time organizing political salons. There's also Dylan, their darling blond-haired son, who relied on Vera's legacy status for admission into a highly competitive public school. Rounding out this ultra-modern family unit are Stella, a sardonic self-driving car, and Kaspie, a chess robot that excels at Danish Gambit openings and dispensing personal advice in equal measure. Outside their apartment every week, protesters flood the streets for March of the Hated, a movement in favour of an enhanced vote, worth five-thirds of a regular vote, for 'those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.' Terrified and heartbroken by these misguided crusaders, Vera one day finds herself assigned to the pro-Five-Three side in a class debate and must learn their arguments in order to win. Her debate partner is Yumi, a student from Japan whom she desperately wishes to befriend and, like Vera, would be cruelly excluded from an enhanced vote. Meanwhile, Vera's parents' marriage is slowly disintegrating, prompting her to draft reasons for each of them to stay together. On a list intended for her father, she appeals to his longing for proximity to the intelligentsia and a comfortable life, writing, 'Went to Brown for graduate school. Makes a lot of delectable 'WASP lunches' for all of us. Is Five-Three which will keep us safe.' On the list for her mother, Vera highlights her father's resilience and artistic efforts: 'Survived his parents and immigration, so can survive anything. Speaks two languages. His long struggle for full recognition is about to be over.' 'Vera, or Faith,' by Gary Shteyngart, Random House, 256 pages, $37.99. Vera's observations subtly point to the central tension within her family: between stated political affiliations and actions taken in one's own domain. Her father is a morally superior leftist who dismisses her stay-at-home mother as a 'tradwife,' despite happily living off her trust fund as he attempts to court a Rhodesian billionaire to buy his magazine. Though she carries out meal preparation and school drop-offs, he declares, 'Labor's my jam. You can actually make a difference with labor.' Her mother lays claim to progressive beliefs, but it's not clear whether her fundraising events are motivated by a desire to enact meaningful change or mere optics. She seems insistent on smoothing over Vera's idiosyncrasies, such as compulsive arm flapping and reciting large vocabulary words, instructing her to mirror the other girls at school. At home, she pays Vera to arrange her bookshelf not alphabetically or by genre, but in a manner where 'authors of color, and women were front and center.' For both parents, the domestic space is a battlefield where political disagreements are fought, rather than where children are guided and supported. One evening, Vera eavesdrops on a conversation between her parents, leading her to believe she must urgently find 'Mom Mom,' her birth mother. Toward this goal, she enlists the help of Yumi, who eagerly assists in playing detective, using her precious weekly four hours of internet use to guess common Korean surnames and cross-reference candidates with alumni of Vera's father's alma mater. An ideal co-conspirator and confidante, Yumi shows Vera what being in touch with one's cultural heritage can look like, what she could gain if their search proved successful, and what had been absent from her upbringing. Told from Vera's eye level, the novel seizes her sense of wonder to draw attention to the absurdity of contemporary life in America. In Shteyngart's near-future, popular kids attend algebra and violin camp over the summer in New York, and two states away, a mandatory 'Holmes' pregnancy blood test — named after the infamous Theranos founder — must be administered to women of reproductive age entering and exiting Ohio. 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Other entries simply include words like 'pontificate' or 'gregariously' that would be unlikely to appear in the lexicons of even the most studious fifth graders. To that end, Shteyngart sustains Vera's interiority, inviting readers into the mind of a child who is bright and exuberant, yet ultimately vulnerable and helpless within the structures of centuries-old institutions. Between holding her family together, finding her biological mother and thriving at school, Vera has plenty to deal with, though the 256-page novel always maintains a buoyancy. Miraculously, Shteyngart manages to braid these struggles of identity, class, love and belonging into a story that reflects the condition of modern life without didacticism. Even in the fourth and final section, where Vera's mission reaches a critical point, readers will sail through the startling revelation about her maternal family and the circumstances surrounding her birth, perhaps to a fault. 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Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
L.A.'s bid to rewrite its City Charter starts off with a spicy leadership battle
Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It's David Zahniser, with an assist from Julia Wick, giving you the latest on city and county government. Here you thought charter reform would be boring. A 13-member citizens commission is just getting started on the painstaking, generally unsexy work of poring through the Los Angeles City Charter, the city's governing document, and coming up with strategies for improving it. Yet already, the commission has had a leadership battle, heard allegations of shady dealings and fielded questions about whether it's been set up to fail. But first, let's back up. Mayor Karen Bass, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and former Council President Paul Krekorian chose a collection of volunteers to serve on the Charter Reform Commission, which is charged with exploring big and small changes to the City Charter. The commission is part of a much larger push for reform sparked by the city's 2022 audio leak scandal and a string of corruption cases involving L.A. officials. The list of potential policy challenges the commission faces is significant. Good government types want the new commission to endorse ranked-choice voting, with Angelenos selecting their elected officials by ranking candidates in numerical order. Advocacy groups want to see a much larger City Council. Some at City Hall want clarity on what to do with elected officials who are accused of wrongdoing but have not been convicted. 'You are not one of those commissions that shows up every few years to fix a few things here or there,' said Raphael Sonenshein, who served nearly 30 years ago as executive director of the city's appointed Charter Reform Commission, while addressing the new commission last week. 'You actually have a bigger responsibility than that.' The real work began on July 16, when the commission took up the question of who should be in charge. Many thought the leadership post would immediately go to Raymond Meza, who had already been serving as the interim chair. Instead, the panel found itself deadlocked. Meza is a high-level staffer at Service Employees International Union Local 721, the powerful public employee union that represents thousands of city workers and has been a big-money spender in support of Bass and many other elected city officials. Meza, who was appointed by Bass earlier this year, picked up five votes. But so did Ted Stein, a real estate developer who has served on an array of city commissions — planning, airport, harbor — but hadn't been on a volunteer city panel in nearly 15 years. Faced with a stalemate, charter commissioners decided to try again a few days later, when they were joined by two additional members. By then, some reform advocates were up in arms over Stein, arguing that he was bringing a record of scandal to the commission. They sent the commissioners news articles pointing out that Stein had, among other things, resigned from the airport commission in 2004 amid two grand jury investigations into whether city officials had tied the awarding of airport contracts to campaign contributions. Stein denied those allegations in 2004, calling them 'false, defamatory and unsubstantiated.' Last week, before the second leadership vote, he shot back at his critics, noting that two law enforcement agencies — the U.S. attorney's office and the L.A. County district attorney's office — declined to pursue charges against him. The Ethics Commission also did not bring a case over his airport commission activities. 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He also supports an increase in the number of City Council members but wouldn't say how many. And he wants to ensure that vacant positions are filled more quickly at City Hall, calling it an issue that 'absolutely needs to be addressed.' That last item has long been a concern for SEIU Local 721, where Meza works as deputy chief of staff. Nevertheless, Meza said he would, to an extent, set aside the wishes of his union during the commission's deliberations. 'On the commission, I am an individual resident of the city,' he said. Stein, for his part, told The Times that he only ran for the leadership post out of concern over the commission's tight timeline. The commission must submit its proposal to the council next spring — a much more aggressive schedule than the one required of two charter reform commissions nearly 30 years ago. Getting through so many complex issues in such a brief period calls for an experienced hand, said Stein, who is 76 and lives in Encino. 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County's public health system, which provides care to the region's neediest residents, could soon face brutal budget cuts. The 'Big Beautiful Bill,' enacted by President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, is on track to carve $750 million per year out of the Department of Health Services, which oversees four public hospitals and roughly two dozen clinics. At the Department of Public Health, which is facing its own $200-million cut, top executive Barbara Ferrer said: 'I've never actually seen this much disdain for public health.' — HOMELESS HIRE: The commission that oversees the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority selected Gita O'Neill, a career lawyer in the city attorney's office, to serve as the agency's interim CEO. O'Neill will replace Va Lecia Adams Kellum, who stepped down Friday after more than two years in her post. — THE JURY SPEAKS: The city has been ordered by a jury to pay $48.8 million to a man who has been in a coma since he was hit by a sanitation truck while crossing a street in Encino. The verdict comes as the city struggles with escalating legal payouts — and was larger than any single payout by the city in the last two fiscal years, according to data provided by the city attorney's office. — LOOKING FOR A LIAISON: Back in May, while signing an executive directive to support local film and TV production, L.A.'s mayor was asked whether she planned to appoint a film liaison as the City Hall point person for productions. 'Absolutely,' Bass said during the news conference, adding that she planned to do so within a few days. That was two months ago. Asked this week about the status of that position, Bass spokesperson Clara Karger touted the executive directive and said the position was 'being hired in conjunction with industry leaders.' She did not provide a timeline. That's it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@ Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
New Mayor Matthew Stroia ready for North Canton leadership role
NORTH CANTON ‒ Matthew Stroia is now the 25th person to lead the city as mayor. "I'm really excited to get started," he said after a swearing-in ceremony on July 25 at City Hall. "It's very emotional because I love this place. This is my hometown and when I gave my first stump speech six years ago, I said I bleed orange and black. And I do." Stroia, 49, who was council president since December 2021 and at large council member since December 2019, succeeds Stephan Wilder, who announced July 22 he was stepping down. Related: North Canton Mayor Stephan Wilder to retire after long career with the city Wilder attended the ceremony. The city charter says the council president becomes mayor if the mayor resigns. Stroia took the oath by a wall with the portraits of his 24 predecessors. Stroia's wife, Jessica Stroia who is the president of the North Canton City School Board, and their 14-year-old son, Aiden, sat in the front row. The room at the North Main Street entrance of City Hall was filled with city employees, nearly all of City Council and well-wishers. They applauded loudly and Wilder embraced Stroia. "Thank you Mayor Wilder," Stroia said. "Over 40 years of public service, and the best thing is you have a big heart and you're a great man." Talking about the city staff and community, Stroia said, "but we're a team. I mean we're all together. So let's always have each other's backs. Go forward and let's always try to improve for all the people. For our community. .... To be the 25th mayor, I wasn't expecting it on this timeline. But I'm very happy to serve." Stephan Wilder issues support Wilder addressed the crowd and thanked the community and city staff. "We have come across so many things in these last few years. We've made major decisions. We've had obstacles. We've had challenges. But we also with working with council, administration and our whole (city) staff all of our decisions are made (for) the welfare of our city," he said. Wilder said he is not moving out of the city. He plans to serve on local boards for nonprofits like North Canton Cares Pantry and the North Canton Heritage Society. Stroia said he will file by the Aug. 6 deadline petition signatures seeking to run for the two-year term starting Dec. 1. Wilder has endorsed Stroia's election. "I think he's going to give all his best. ... He's rounded. He's a hometown young man. He comes from a great family. I think he has good working knowledge of city government in his time on city council," Wilder said. The mayor is a part-time position, according to the city charter. The mayor hires with approval of council the director of administration who serves at the pleasure of the mayor. The mayor has the power to veto legislation approved by council. By state law, Stroia will earn $19,418 a year, a pay increase from $8,809 a year that he earned as council president. North Canton mayoral history Wilder was the eighth mayor of North Canton to resign before the end of his term. This last happened in 1998 when William Hines resigned to become the city's law director. Then-Council President Darryl Revoldt became the mayor. Council member Stephanie Werren, At Large, becomes the council president. Council will appoint a resident of the city to the vacant at-large council member position to serve the remainder of the two-year term until Nov. 30. Stroia owns and operates the tax filing firm Buckeye Tax, the investment advisory firm Investment Network and two businesses at Oakwood Square in Plain Township, the cigar bar OSI and the brewery Spider Monkey. Stroia has not announced any plans as mayor, other then talking with staff and learning more about city departments. Twenty-four others have served as mayor of North Canton. The first mayor was William H. "Boss" Hoover, from 1906 to 1909, when the community was a village known as New Berlin. Three of the 25 served as mayor in two non-consecutive periods. Reach Robert at This article originally appeared on The Repository: Matthew Stroia becomes 25th mayor of North Canton Solve the daily Crossword
