The Professionalization of Urban Accessibility

Abstract

U.S. disability access law has a compliance issue. While disability law “on the books” is composed of civil rights legislation, regulations, and specified codes, in reality, decades after their enactment, many places of public accommodation remain inaccessible and out of reach for individuals with physical disabilities. Disability law scholars had observed how the federal level enforcement of accessibility standards is not done on the design stage but only ex post through private litigation. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the ways state and local laws deal with enforcing accessibility standards. This Article begins filling this gap in the literature by looking at the enforcement level of disability access in the context of urban built environments. Specifically, this Article examines the ways large U.S. cities have used their regulatory tools and state laws to move access enforcement forward through a process of professionalization. Disability scholars have observed how disability access law increased the need for professional experts on accessibility, who serve as agents of enforcement in the early stages of planning, development and construction in urban environments. This process of producing accessibility experts was not standardized in the United States on the federal level. Instead, it was left to the discretion of states and local authorities. Each city decides whether it wants to take an active or passive role in instituting accessibility professionals and mechanisms of enforcement. Many municipalities in large cities have established a special office or commission in charge of enforcing accessibility of the built environment. Not all large cities, however, take the same approach to create expertise for implementing disability access laws, creating what this Article terms a diffused model of professionalization and enforcement. While most cities take a similar “hands-on” approach with enforcing disability access laws in their government-owned buildings and facilities, a variety of methods exists for enforcing the law in privately owned places of public accommodations. This Article also looks beyond the United States to Israel, a country that modeled its disability rights laws after the United States, yet it has a centralized model of professionalization and enforcement, standardized, streamlined, and enforced at the national level. The two legal systems diverge on issues of federalism, the role of government and legal culture, yet they converge on their views of the ways disability anti-discrimination law should look. Nevertheless, despite this similarity, the Israeli system embraces a centralized and proactive approach to the professionalization and enforcement of accessibility, putting in place regulatory mechanisms that can only be found sporadically within local governments in the United States. Meaning, the Israeli ideas about enforcing accessibility are not entirely foreign in the U.S context, yet showing how a full embrace of these mechanisms can look is instructive in offering valuable lessons and recommendations on how professionalization could lead to enforcement of accessibility standards.