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ABSTRACT
Much existing housing stock is inaccessible and does not adequately meet the needs of households with disabled members. As a result, households must often seek dwelling adaptations to improve the accessibility of their existing housing. However, adaptations can be costly, particularly in the context of limited state subsidies. This study examines the extent to which households with disabled members in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, have access to needed dwelling adaptations and the impact of these adaptations on dwelling satisfaction. Using data from the Canadian Housing Survey, we find that close to ten percent of Ontario households need one or more disability-related dwelling adaptations, but close to half of these households do not have all the adaptations they need. Households led by older adults are more likely to have needed dwelling adaptations, as are renter households in the social housing sector. With respect to dwelling satisfaction, households with needed adaptations reported similar levels of satisfaction to households without disabled members, while households who did not have needed adaptations reported significantly lower satisfaction with their dwellings. These findings signal the importance of improving state supports for dwelling adaptations as one part of a broader commitment to inclusive housing policy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08882746.2023.2295182
Notes
1. Further information on the CHS sampling frame and methodology can be found at https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/46-25-0001/2021001/2018-eng.zip. The file was accessed through Statistics Canada’s Research Data Centre at the author’s home institution.
2. The data were weighted using Statistics Canada’s standardized weight, and all reported percentages and raw totals use this standard weight. A normalized weight was used for the t-tests and logistic regression models.
3. The CHS user guide refers to disability as “a physical or mental disability, condition or illness that makes it necessary to have adaptations to your dwelling.”
4. Age, gender, and race are person-level variables (i.e., asked for each member of the household). For our analysis, we have used responses of PERSON 1 – as “the household member with the most knowledge of the household’s housing situation” to represent the household as a whole.
5. Dwelling satisfaction was originally captured by a five-point Likert scale. This was converted into bivariate form for the regression model, with Very Satisfied and Satisfied coded Satisfied, and Very Dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, and Neither Satisfied nor Dissatisfied coded as Dissatisfied.
6. Items used in the descriptive analysis but excluded from regression models were household size, rent subsidy, homeownership, and living in social/affordable housing. These were excluded either because another variable was already capturing that information, or they were too similar and/or interacted poorly with other model variables.
7. The 2016 Census indicated that 40% of Canadian households were led by women, so our approach overestimates the number of women-led households.
8. It is important to gather information about the specific adaptations that householders with different types of disabilities need, and to gauge the extent to which they have access to those adaptations. Recent work from Japan found that people with cognitive and visual disabilities were less likely to have housing adaptations than those with mobility limitations (Tsuchiya-Ito et al., Citation2022). It is also possible to gauge people’s level of need in a more nuanced way.
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Notes on contributors
Nicholas Langdon
Nicholas Langdon is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at the University of Western Ontario in London. He received his master’s degree in Geography from McMaster University in 2022; his thesis focused on the lack of intersections between disability and housing policy in Ontario and the theoretical implications of their disconnect within the provincial policy arena. He is a quantitative researcher interested in Canadian social policy and social justice. His work has been supported by SSHRC and OGS, and he was the 2019 Undergraduate Esri Canada Young Scholar for his GIS work.
Robert Wilton
Robert Wilton is a Professor in the School of Earth, Environment and Society at McMaster University. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California in 1999. His research has focused on disabled people’s experiences finding and keeping paid employment in both market and social economies; accessing and maintaining housing; and negotiating state welfare/disability benefits systems. Robert has co-edited the books ‘Towards Enabling Geographies’ (Ashgate) and ‘Using Space’ (Routledge). He has served as an editor for the journal Social and Cultural Geography and is currently an associate editor for Health & Place.
K. Bruce Newbold
K. Bruce Newbold is a Professor in the School of Earth, Environment & Society (SEES) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He received his PhD in Geography from McMaster University in 1994 and worked at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign between 1994 and 2000 before returning to McMaster in 2000. Since returning to McMaster, he has held Guest Scholar positions at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California San Diego (2004), and the Medical Research Council’s Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow (2008), a position which included a Fellowship through the Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow. Trained as a population geographer, his research interests include health, aging, mobility and transportation. His work has been supported by SSHRC and CIHR.