Disability commission to seek replacement of group home rules stricken from code

Advocates for people with disabilities are expected to ask the city to update recent building code changes that promote density but could make it easier for unregulated group homes to set up shop throughout Austin.

At Friday’s meeting of the Mayor’s Committee for People With Disabilities, Zoning and Platting Commissioner Betsy Greenberg spoke about the changes made at the same time as December’s passage of the HOME initiative, the main purpose of which was to encourage denser living options. One of the changes removed caps on how many unrelated people could live in a home under single-family zoning, which Greenberg said was likely done to make it easier to establish co-ops and other dense housing options in areas near the University of Texas campus.

But those changes, which in part eliminated the zoning classifications for covering group homes for residences with 15 or fewer adults, also took away the inspection and other regulatory requirements for group homes that provide care for older adults or people with disabilities. Such changes could impact their ability to live independently. Previously, group residential operations, which are often run as for-profit businesses, were allowed only in multifamily zoning areas and required annual inspections by Austin Fire Department and the Code Department to check for structural safety and make sure no overcrowding or neglect was taking place.

“With the new group residential definitions, only homes with 16 or more adults and food provided by a third party – only the ones that qualify as meeting the group residential definition – will have fire and life safety inspections, which I think is a danger,” Greenberg said. “When those definitions are removed, the uses either fit the group residential definition and they’re allowed only in multifamily zones, or they’re allowed in single-family with no limit on the number of residents the family home is providing 24-hour care for in a protected living environment.”

Greenberg said she spoke with City Council members including Zo Qadri about the potential unintended deregulation of group homes that could result from the HOME initiative, with the expectation that amendments would be made to correct the issue. Those amendments never materialized, which is why she asked the disability commission to make a requests at one of its next meetings to propose code enforcement and for the Fire Department to require inspections of all properties with seven or more residents regardless of zoning classification. Another change would be removing the third-party food preparation condition from designating a property as a group home.

“Initially, I thought that’s really not what the Council intended. Those codes were written pretty quickly and passed pretty quickly, but the concern is that family and group homes are often run by for-profit entities, so the regulation and the inspection is really important,” she said.

The adjustments Greenberg proposed would extend the regulations for inspections potentially to all foster homes, senior congregate living facilities or group homes for those living with disabilities.

Mayor Pro Tem Leslie Pool, who led the HOME initiative that was passed in tandem with the changes in occupancy limits, said there are still sections of the building code that provide oversight of group homes.

“The regulations now revert to the building code, getting our building code out of the zoning code, which makes a lot more sense, especially considering that occupancy limits have often been used to discriminate against large families,” she said.

“We depend on Integral Care, and we depend on (the Austin Code Department) for certain things around the health and safety of a building,” she said. “But just because you have an occupancy limit doesn’t mean that Code automatically gets to go inside, nor are they qualified to judge the state of the building inside once they get in there. The guardrails aren’t going away. We are simply shifting the building code items out of the zoning chapter. They still exist, but they’re in a different part of code.”

Commission members were roundly in support of the changes Greenberg suggested and asked for her help in outlining and drafting a recommendation that could be considered at a future meeting.

“Doing away with these kinds of inspections for populations that are disabled or populations like the juvenile delinquents for instance, or any population that can’t speak for themselves, fully really makes me uncomfortable,” Commissioner Jennifer Powell said. “When you’re living in an apartment, in a multifamily unit, you have mandatory fire inspections and you have like all kinds of mandatory inspections for safety. It just seems kind of common sense and I’m sort of surprised that the city of Austin would do away with that.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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