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1. The majority of residents in our present institutions are housed in buildings which would fail to meet architectural-engineering standards. In a number of states, extensive architectural-engineer-surveys have shown that renovation of most of the older and sometimes even newer buildings costs as much or more than expenses involved in building, or utilizing existing buildings, in the community. In estimating the cost per place in these existing institutions, one must also take into consideration the costs involved in renovating supportive buildings such as kitchens, schools, activity buildings and areas, auditoriums, chapels, bowling alleys, swimming pools, and, above all, the fact that any adequate renovation will decrease the capacity of the traditional institutional building on the average by 50 percent. When the total cost of such architectural rehabilitation is averaged out, it may come to as much as $11,000 per residential place.

The remarkable point here is that after expenditures of such magnitude, one would still end up with vast and essentially segregated facilities, located in areas where today one would not place residential facilities in the first place if one applied modern concepts such :s normalization.

2. It is furthermore of interest to examine the cost factors in the operation of the traditional-omnibus versus modern-specialized residences. A number of considerations are pertinent here.

The more residents a building is designed to accommodate, the stricter become the building codes that must be observed. While small residences can be built at relatively modest costs, the cost per place increases drastically when buildings are designed to house more than approximately 8-20 residents. Furthermore, buildings erected at high initial cost are much more durable and therefore impose limits upon the exercise of options as time goes by. Some buildings with relatively short-life expectancy can conceivably be abandoned after approximately 20 years so as to enable the service system to engage in continuous planning, to incorporate new concepts and ideas into buildings, and to permit flexible relocation of services. Larger and therefore more durable buildings, on the other hand, may have to be utilized for several generations. Here, we have much to learn from Scandinavia, where residential facilities are increasingly designed and constructed along lines of ordinary community housing, which has, of course, a relatively limited life expectancy.

Application of the normalization principle will guide the architect in the design of rooms and buildings which will be as close to normal living situations as is possible. Keeping in mind the principle of growth and change, he will design rooms and houses with a maximum of flexibility so that furnishings may be added as the resident learns to cope with them, large bedrooms subdivided into smaller rooms, and confining spaces opened up to provide freedom of movement. While in the earlier stages each unit should be completely self-contained and separate from other units (if located in the same building they could be arranged as separate apartments), at a later date the flexibility of design might be utilized to create certain common social rooms to be used by two or more groups together while still providing separate living space in each of the basic units for those not ready to join the larger social grouping.

Some Special Problems

A large-scale application of the normalization principle and the associated concept of dispersal would bring over the next 10 to 20 years a steadily growing number of mentally retarded persons into our cities and suburbs as residents of various group residences. That mentally retarded individuals can live in small group residences in our cities and suburbs has been well demonstrated by now as far as the social aspects of this arrangement are concerned. Together with similar developments in the area of other handicaps, this will constitute a real challenge to urban planning and should, on the federal level, gain the sympathetic attention of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the present time, the multiplicity of zoning ordinances discriminate in one way or the other against handicapped citizens. Some of them are so biased in favor of property owners and against considerations of public interest that legislative relief seems to be called for.

Another series of obstacles in the development of better residential services for the mentally retarded is created through local and state building codes, the national safety code, and a long list of local, state, and federal regulations.

The United States Advisory Committee on Intergovernmental Relations had the following to say in a 1966 publication entitled Building Codes: A Program for Intergovernmental Reform: "Obsolete code requirements, unnecessary diversity of such requirements among local jurisdictions, and inadequate administration and enforcement, taken together tend to place unjustified burdens on the technology and economics of buildings. Too many building codes contain unnecessarily high standards, prevent the use of economical methods and materials in building, and include provisions extraneous to the basic purposes and objectives of building controls." Most architects who have been involved in the design and construction of facilities for the mentally retarded would feel that this is a very mild statement indeed compared with the unreasonable and often irrational obstacles that they are encountering when trying to use informal and less expensive construction, particularly in buildings housing totally ambulant, generally able-bodied, mentally retarded children or adults.