Aging in place in Green Valley

We match across Tucson and the surrounding Pima County communities, so the contractor you are introduced to is one whose crews actually work your part of the county.

Permits, utilities and local rules for Aging in Place work in Green Valley

Green Valley is unincorporated, so a curbless conversion, a widened bathroom door or a ramp here is a Pima County Development Services permit rather than a town or city one. The water account is with the community's own utility: Community Water Company of Green Valley, a member-owned non-profit corporation that serves Green Valley and parts of the Town of Sahuarita and draws from the Upper Santa Cruz sub-basin. Because the community is unincorporated, a homeowner may deal with the county for the permit and with Green Valley Recreation or a homeowner association for the architectural review, and in a villa or cluster home that association approval is often the step that decides the start date. The housing is the reason this community is on the list at all: single-storey ranch houses, villas and cluster homes built from the 1960s onward, most of them 1970s to 1990s, all on a slab, with interior doors of 28 to 32 inches in the earlier sections and 32 to 36 inches later, and a step down to a covered patio or a screened Arizona room rather than a flush threshold. Because the demand is concentrated at one end of the age range, the usual requests are the tub-out shower, grab-bar blocking behind a tiled wall, a non-slip floor and a threshold that can be taken out.

Municipal reference: Community Water Company of Green Valley

Getting an accessibility contractor out to Green Valley

Green Valley is entered from I-19 at the Duval Mine Road and Continental Road exits, with Esperanza Boulevard, Abrego Drive, La Canada Drive and Camino del Sol carrying the traffic inside the community. Once a crew is inside the grid the addresses are close together and the internal roads are quiet, which makes this an efficient area to work - the drive in, not the drive around, is the time cost. Two practical points come up here. First, the community is large and internally varied: the sections built in the 1960s and 1970s have narrower streets and shorter driveways than the later additions, so access changes block by block. Second, work at a villa or a cluster home is usually an association matter before it is a construction one, so the entry procedure, any parking restriction and the approved working hours are worth settling before the first delivery. Summer is the other constraint, and it is bigger here than in most of the metro: the walks between the car and the door are unshaded, and a concrete pad in July is a genuine hazard to anyone using a walker or a wheelchair.

What Green Valley's housing stock means for aging in place

Green Valley is retirement housing, and it reads differently for accessibility than the rest of the metro. The single-storey ranch houses built in the 1960s and 1970s are on a slab with one hall bath in the smaller plans and two in the larger, a tub-and-shower combination behind a 28 to 30 inch door, tile floors, and a step down from the living area to a covered patio. The later villas and cluster homes from the 1980s and 1990s have 32 to 36 inch doors, a separate shower and often a garden tub, and tile throughout. The two-storey sections add stairs to the question. Wall construction is block, so grab-bar blocking has to be opened and added in most of the older sections rather than assumed, and any widening of a doorway is a framing conversation. The exterior detail that matters most here is the threshold: covered patios, screened Arizona rooms and carports sit a step below or above the interior floor in almost every plan, and that single step is the one households live with longest before mentioning it. The soil is the other constant - caliche with expansive clay beneath it, which moves with the monsoon and shows up as hairline cracks in the tile and doors that no longer close.

What accessibility work does a Green Valley home need most?

Which Aging in Place services can we match in Green Valley, AZ?

How much does aging in place work cost in Green Valley, AZ?

Sources

Aging in Place tools & calculators

Aging in Place resources