I read in the New York Times this morning about a housing complex built with state and federal funds in Tempe, Arizona. Intended to provide a comfortable community for the hearing impaired, it was designed by an architect who is deaf. It includes such amenities as video phones, lights that flash when the phone or doorbell rings, and a mechanism to allow loudspeaker announcements to be piped right into residents’ hearing aids. It’s called Apache ASL Trail (ASL as in American Sign Language).
All 75 units are occupied -- there was a waiting list even before it opened last year -- 69 of them by persons who are deaf or hard of hearing.
And now the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has concluded that this first-of-its-kind innovation in housing for the deaf is in violation of federal law. The government says they are discriminating against people who have different disabilities or, I guess, none at all.
Your tax dollars at work.
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