Where It Started
I’ve lived in my current apartment for over 17 years now, the longest I’ve ever stayed anywhere. When I first moved in, I knew right away it was the place for me: big, spacious rooms and a huge window I fell in love with. But the truth is, this place didn’t come from careful searching and comparing options. It just happened to fall in my lap at the right time. And that’s not always how it goes.
That’s the part I want to talk about, because it’s something a lot of people never have to think about: apartment hunting while disabled is a completely different process.
The Missing Checkbox
When you’re searching listings, there’s no checkbox or toggle switch that says “wheelchair accessible.” Some buildings will advertise “wheelchair access,” but that phrase can mean almost anything. It might mean you can get into the building. It might mean you can get into a unit. It doesn’t tell you whether that specific unit is actually accessible: whether it has a roll-in shower, whether the counters are low enough to roll under, whether the doorways are wide enough for your chair to fit through at all.
You don’t find any of that out from a listing. You find it out by calling. By asking. By hoping whoever answers actually knows the details of the unit and isn’t just guessing. That’s the struggle I run into, and one I know a lot of other wheelchair users and people who use mobility aids run into too. It’s a lot of extra legwork for something that’s simple and easy for people without mobility issues. They can filter by price and location and move-in date and be done with it. We have to build in an entire extra layer of research just to find out if a place is livable for us at all.
Why We’re Still Here
That reality is a big part of why I’ve stayed put for 17 years even as my current apartment has started to show its age. Right now, as I’m writing this, it’s 81° in here and 77° outside. Every year around lease renewal time, I think about looking for somewhere new. And every year, I come up empty, because I haven’t found anywhere else that checks all the boxes this place does: wide doorways, a roll-in shower, room to get under the kitchen counter. Those aren’t extras for me. They’re the baseline for whether a place is even usable.
Add cost on top of that. Our rent with utilities runs somewhere between the high $1,500s and low $1,600s, and accessible units aren’t exactly common at that price point, or at any price point, really. So even when I do work up the will to look, the pool of options I’m choosing from is tiny compared to what a non-disabled renter would see for the same budget and the same city.
Location Isn’t Just a Preference
Beyond accessibility inside the unit itself, there’s the question of where that unit sits. For us, location isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s practically its own accessibility issue.
I work in downtown St. Paul, so an easy commute matters a lot to me. It matters just as much for Jason, who is deaf and has low vision. Living downtown means he can navigate the community easily, with everything he needs close and reachable. If we moved further out toward the edges of Minneapolis, ease of getting around could become a real problem for both of us.
One thing I don’t think about often enough until winter hits: downtown is mostly businesses and apartment buildings, and snow removal here is prompt. That’s not always true further out, where clearing sidewalks often falls on individual residents who have jobs and lives of their own and aren’t always quick about it. For someone using a wheelchair, an unshoveled sidewalk isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a wall.
Jason has told me that moving out to the suburbs or the outskirts of Minneapolis would likely leave him feeling isolated, since there just isn’t much around to access on his own. He’d also probably have to give up his job at U.S. Bank Stadium since the commute and the late-night hours would be too hard to manage. Right now, when either of us works a shift there, it’s a six block walk. Simple, manageable, doable in almost any weather. Move away from the downtown core, and that gets a lot harder for both of us. Honestly, if we left downtown, I’d almost certainly give up that job myself, though since I only work it once every three or four months, that loss would sting a lot less for me than it would for him.
Looking Ahead: Driving and Parking
There’s one more piece to this that’s been on my mind lately, and it’s a little different from everything above because it’s not about moving. It’s about staying and what needs to change if I do.
I’m currently in the process of getting my driver’s license, and down the road, I’m looking at getting a wheelchair accessible van. That’s exciting, but it’s also made me start paying a lot closer attention to something I hadn’t thought much about before: parking.
At my current building, I’ve noticed people parking in the access aisle, the striped-off space next to an accessible spot that’s supposed to stay clear so a wheelchair user has room to load and unload. Every so often, someone parks in the handicap spot itself without a permit. Right now that’s an annoyance. Once I actually own an accessible van, it stops being an annoyance and becomes a real problem, because that access aisle is the difference between being able to get my chair in and out of the vehicle or not.
I honestly don’t know yet what the parking garage situation looks like for accessible spots, how many there are, how they’re monitored, or how seriously it’s enforced. As far as I can tell, the garage doesn’t actually have any handicap parking at all, which means that’s a separate conversation I’ll need to have with management.
I have already brought up the access aisle issue with management, and I haven’t heard back. It’s still happening. Cars parked in the aisle, no response, no fix. That’s frustrating on its own, and it doesn’t exactly build confidence about how a future conversation about garage accessibility would go. This has genuinely become a factor in the “stay or go” decision, right alongside accessibility, cost, and location.
It also ties back into the location question from earlier. If we ended up moving to the outer ring of Minneapolis or out to the suburbs, I’d likely become a lot more reliant on driving myself and on Jason driving, instead of being able to walk or roll most places the way we do now. Which means parking access, both at home and everywhere else we’d need to go, would matter even more than it already does.
Necessities vs. Nice-to-Haves
There’s another layer to all of this that I keep turning over in my head: the difference between what I need and what I want.
Wheelchair accessibility isn’t negotiable. That one’s not up for debate. But beyond that baseline, I have a whole list of “would be nice” items. A second bedroom. A washer and dryer in the unit instead of a shared laundry room. A balcony or a patio. Those are perks, not necessities, and I know it.
The problem is that most wheelchair accessible units aren’t going to check all of those boxes. Accessible units are already a small slice of what’s out there, so once you start layering on extra wants, that slice gets even smaller. Which raises a real question: would I be willing to give up some of those nice-to-haves for the sake of finding something that’s actually wheelchair accessible? Almost certainly, yes.
But it also raises a harder question, one I don’t love sitting with: would I be willing to compromise on some of the necessities instead? Would I settle for a unit that’s only partially accessible if it meant I finally got a balcony or an in-unit washer? I don’t think I have an answer to that yet, and honestly, I’m not sure I want to find out the hard way.
Lots of Questions, Not Many Answers
So we’re kind of stuck. I think what we need to do is head into winter and really sit down to figure things out. Do we actually want to move? Can we afford to? If we did move, where would we even go, and what would we be looking for? Would we be willing to give up some of the roughly 750 square feet we have now for a better location or better features?
I don’t have this figured out yet. But I do know that whatever we decide, the search itself is going to take a lot more calls, a lot more questions, and a lot more patience than it would for most people. For us, “accessible” and “livable” and “close to everything” all have to line up at once, and that’s a much smaller circle than most renters ever have to think about.
Have You Been Through This?
I’d love to know I’m not the only one wrestling with this. If you use a wheelchair or another mobility aid, how did you go about finding your current place? Did you have a system for vetting units before wasting time on a tour that turned out to be a dead end? Are there resources, websites, or local organizations that actually helped you cut through the guesswork?
I know accessible housing resources exist out there, but I haven’t found one yet that felt built for someone in my exact situation, balancing accessibility, affordability, and location all at once. If you’ve found something that worked for you, or if you’re in the middle of this same search right now, I’d genuinely like to hear about it. Drop a comment or reach out. Let’s compare notes.
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