Alex Eylar renders Wait Until Dark’s harrowing chase scene in LEGO form.
In the 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark, Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman unwittingly caught up in an international drug smuggling plot and forced to fight off Alan Arkin, who plays a deadly intruder in her apartment. In a situation that may seem hopeless, Hepburn’s character levels the playing field by breaking (almost) every light bulb in the flat, plunging Arkin’s character into the same darkness she lives with every day.
So maybe it’s just a scary movie, but for some reason I often think about it when reflecting upon accessible housing. Maybe it’s because today we can all be glad that people don’t have to go to such lengths to create spaces that can be used with equal ease, regardless of ability. In fact, an accessible home can mean a better life for all occupants.
One of the best new guides I have run across to achieve this goal is The Accessible Home: Designing for All Ages & Abilities, by Deborah Pierce. The structure of this handbook is smart. Pierce leads off with the necessary definitions and then introduces readers to the accessible home from one activity to the next (living and dining, dressing and sleeping, etc.). She then leads readers on tours of 25 real accessible homes, dealing firsthand with the practical solutions needed by very different individuals and families.
To some real estate professionals, accessible housing remains a niche. But for the forward-thinking pros in the know, this is the future of housing. As Pierce notes, healthy active adults have a one-in-four chance of becoming disabled for at least three months at some point in their lives. And while aging in place is becoming a priority for older home buyers, younger home owners still want to accommodate family and friends visiting their homes, regardless of mobility issues. Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
Whether it’s McMansions or manufactured homes, chances are you’ve dealt with at least one property that was influenced in some way by William Levitt. What’s that? You’ve never heard of William Levitt? Well, that’s not too surprising. Even though he was the closest thing the housing industry had to Henry Ford, the vast majority of Americans probably have no idea who he is.
But most of them are almost certainly familiar with his handiwork. That’s because he was responsible for turning a potato field in western Long Island into Levittown, N.Y., the first post-World War II suburb, and a town widely considered to be the progenitor of “Suburbia” as an American cultural institution.
Real estate writer Steve Bergsman explores Levitt’s legacy in his new book, Growing Up Levittown: In a Time of Conformity, Controversy and Cultural Crisis (Dancing Traveller Media, 2011). Bergsman is more intimately familiar with that legacy than most: His family moved to Levittown in 1954.
Despite that familiarity — or perhaps because of it — there were some surprises for Bergsman as he was doing research for the book.
“When I moved there, I was a young child and didn’t know the history,” he explains. “I had a happy childhood and enjoyed living in Levittown. But as I researched Levittown, I realized it had a bad name in the 1950s and 1960s.”
The reason? Public intellectuals across the political spectrum saw Levittown as an abomination, Bergsman says. Left-leaning thinkers viewed it as artificial and conformist, while many on the right attacked it out of something like snobbery for its apparent lack of style and quality. Continue reading »
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