Monday, November 28, 2011

ADA & FHA: Apartments and Condominium Units

Last month, we have been talking about the Fair Housing Act (FHA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as those requirements pertain to apartments and condominiums.

Both the ADA and FHA requirements, and, to simply those requirements, think of those requirements inside the apartment unit or condominium unit as being FHA, and outside of the unit as ADA.  The March 1991 Grandfathering found in FHA only applies to the inside of the units and the reason why is that of retrofit cost or the fact that in some cases impossible to do.

Keep in mind that the developer is no longer in the picture and now we are dealing with individual owners.  Now, we can go one step further and say that if we have apartment units with Federal government funding, that we see in government housing, then those units have the highest degree of accessibility requirement as found in the ADA.

This is all in the opinion of ACCESS and over the course of the next few years, I expect we will see Federal case law in support of the ACCESS opinion, as we are moving forward with the filing of ADA non-compliant building complaints.

Give us your questions or thoughts on the above article.  You can post them here or on our FaceBook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Access-Technologies-Services-Inc/268659564730.  You can also reach us at hfalstad@accessts.net or call us at (702) 649-7575.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Hank


The above are opinions of Hank Falstad, AIA, Managing Senior Associate of Access Technologies Services, Inc. (ACCESS).  See our web site for additional information:  www.accessts.net.

No comments:

Post a Comment