I'm really frustrated. I've been bored, so I've been looking into funding to get a ramp built into my house. Someone broke into our garage twice in the last month, and so I'm nervous about my wheelchairs, for obvious reasons. They also stop running in winter randomly, because they are stored in my garage, and anyone who knows anything about Edmonton knows that gel batteries can freeze on a -45 night, which then disallows me to get to school, work, or even volunteer commitments.

I'm not eligible for funding cause I rent, so that sucks, I don't qualify. Even If I did, my landlords would have to renovate the doors and put in wider doors and a barrier-free house, and a lot of landlords just flat out refuse to do that.

So I started looking for wheelchair accessible homes. There are a few, but the problem is that most houses that say that they are "accessible" are not ACTUALLY accessible. The doors are not wide, it's not built to be accessible, it's just built with a ramp, so I'd have to buy a plot of land and build to specific-build.

How the heck do disabled people pay for this? I'm serious. I'm trying to claw my way up, I'm low income (disability), I'm going to post-secondary, and I'm barely scraping by, and all I can think is why do disabled folks fall through all the cracks? I'm so frustrated. There's no way I can afford to build or buy a house in the near future, through no fault of my own, but simply because I've been dealt a lot more barriers than your average 30 year old. If I feel like this, how many other disabled folks are also slipping through the cracks? This is what worries me.

Even when I was doing my internship at Century Place for the City of Edmonton's Diversity and Inclusion sector it was NOT accessible. The bathrooms weren't and I had a lot of trouble, getting into the office was not, keying into the building was not. City Hall in Edmonton is not even accessible- I can't get my wheelchair into any one of the washrooms!

My question is who is designing these buildings? Is there anyone disabled who's on the architects team? There clearly needs to be. Why aren't we hiring more diverse folks when it comes to the buildings that, we, as the disabled community need to work and live in.