Accessibility compliance in construction, the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Housing Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and state accessibility codes, is the area of construction regulation where post-construction remediation costs are most consistently disproportionate to the cost of getting it right during construction. A doorway that is one inch too narrow, a bathroom turning radius that is six inches too small, or a curb ramp that is installed at the wrong slope can cost tens of thousands of dollars to correct in a completed building, for what would have been a minor adjustment during construction.
The regulatory framework is complex, federal, state, and local requirements overlap in ways that construction teams without specific accessibility training sometimes misread, but the practical compliance requirements for most multifamily and commercial construction are well-understood by practitioners who work with them regularly.
The Regulatory Framework: Three Overlapping Standards
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA applies to places of public accommodation and commercial facilities, essentially all commercial buildings where the public is invited and all multi-tenant commercial buildings. ADA Standards for Accessible Design govern the design and construction of accessible elements: accessible routes, parking spaces, restrooms, entrances, and service counters. For new construction, ADA compliance requires that all areas of the building be accessible unless structural impracticability makes it technically infeasible.
The ADA does not directly apply to private residential dwelling units, but it applies to the common areas of multifamily residential projects. The lobby, the leasing office, the fitness center, the mail room, the parking structure, all of these are public accommodation areas subject to ADA requirements in a multifamily project.
Fair Housing Act (FHA), the design and construction requirements. The Fair Housing Act’s design and construction provisions apply to all multifamily housing built after 1991 with four or more units, covering the vast majority of multifamily development. The FHA’s design and construction requirements specify minimum accessibility standards for covered units: accessible building entrance on an accessible route, accessible common areas, usable doors throughout the unit, accessible route into and through the unit, accessible environmental controls and electrical outlets, reinforced bathroom walls for future grab bar installation, and usable kitchens and bathrooms.
The FHA’s requirements are less demanding than ADA commercial accessibility in most respects, they are designed to ensure that people with disabilities can live in and use multifamily housing, not to provide the same level of access as commercial facilities. But they apply to every covered dwelling unit, and failure to meet them creates both individual remediation obligations and potential exposure to class action complaints that can be expensive far beyond the physical correction cost.
State accessibility codes. Washington, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico all have state accessibility code requirements that reference, adopt, or exceed federal standards. Washington’s Chapter 11 of the Washington State Building Code incorporates ADA-referenced accessibility standards with state-specific modifications. Texas has its own accessibility standards, the Texas Accessibility Standards (TAS), administered by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which require review and inspection of covered projects by TDLR before a certificate of occupancy is issued.
The Most Common Compliance Failures
In multifamily construction, the compliance failures that are most frequently identified in post-construction accessibility surveys and Fair Housing Act complaints:
Accessible route from parking to unit entry. The accessible route from designated accessible parking spaces to the accessible unit entry must be continuous and without barriers, no steps, no cross-slopes exceeding 2%, no surface changes that break the route’s continuity. Projects where the accessible parking spaces are properly marked but the route from the spaces to the building entry includes a step up to a landing, or crosses a sloped driveway that exceeds 2% cross-slope, have a systematic compliance failure that typically affects multiple units and requires site reconstruction to correct.
Bathroom turning radius. The FHA requires a clear floor space of 30 by 48 inches in front of each fixture in bathrooms in covered units, a requirement that affects the layout of small bathrooms where the toilet, lavatory, and shower or tub compete for limited floor area. The most common failure: a bathroom layout that provides adequate individual fixture clearances but whose total floor area prevents the required turning radius when all fixtures are in place.
Door hardware. Lever-style door hardware that can be operated with a closed fist is required on all doors serving covered units, including closet doors, interior doors, and all hardware components. Projects where the specified door hardware is lever-style but where closet doors were installed with knob hardware by a subcontractor who defaulted to their standard specification have systematic hardware compliance failures that require unit-by-unit correction.
The Texas TDLR Review Process
Texas’s accessibility review by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) is a specific compliance pathway that applies to covered commercial and multifamily projects. TDLR review requires submitting construction documents for review before a building permit is issued, TDLR reviews the documents against the Texas Accessibility Standards and either approves them or issues comments requiring corrections. At project completion, a TDLR inspection verifies that the building was constructed in conformance with the approved documents before a certificate of occupancy can be issued.
Developers and GCs in Texas who have not worked with TDLR review before sometimes encounter the inspection as a surprise at project completion, not knowing that TDLR approval of construction documents was a required step before the building permit was issued, and discovering that their building permit was conditioned on TDLR review that was not completed.
Construction teams who integrate ADA compliance review into their standard quality control process, rather than treating it as a final-inspection checklist item, avoid the costly late-project corrections that are the most common source of ADA-related certificate of occupancy delays.
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