Aging in place in Tucson

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 Tucson

Tucson is the one community on this list where the permit and the water account both come from the same city. Tucson Water supplies roughly 722,000 customers across a 390-square-mile service area, and the building permit for a curbless shower conversion, a widened bathroom doorway or a ramp at a City of Tucson address is issued by the city's Planning and Development Services department rather than by Pima County - and that city file is the record an insurer or a future buyer will ask for. Tucson Water also serves addresses outside the city limits, including parts of Marana, Oro Valley, South Tucson and unincorporated Pima County, so the provider is worth confirming by address: the city line and the utility line do not always run together. The houses the city permit covers are the reason the work here is specific. Most of the in-town stock is single storey on a slab with no basement, built through the middle of the twentieth century and again in the 1970s and 1980s, and the bathroom is typically a five-by-eight hall bath with a tub and a shower curtain behind a door that measures 28 to 30 inches. That door is the deciding measurement - a walker or a wheelchair needs the doorway before it needs the shower - and because the wall is concrete block, widening it is a framing and finishing job rather than a trimming job. Where the house sits in a condominium or a deed-restricted street, the association's architectural review runs alongside the city permit, and it is the approval that usually sets the timeline rather than the contractor's calendar.

Municipal reference: Tucson Water

Getting an accessibility contractor out to Tucson

Tucson is the base of the map. I-10 runs east-west across the city and meets I-19, which runs south toward Sahuarita and Green Valley; Oracle Road (AZ-77) runs north to Oro Valley, and Grant Road, Broadway Boulevard, Speedway Boulevard, 22nd Street, Ajo Way, Valencia Road, Kolb Road, Houghton Road, Tanque Verde Road and Sunrise Drive are the arterials the rest of this list is measured from. That is why an in-town Tucson address is usually the easiest request to fit beside an existing job: the drive is not the question, the access is. The practical limits are the old streets themselves - narrow, tree-shaded, and often without a driveway long enough for a material drop and a dumpster at the same time - and the heat. From May through September an exterior step, a walkway or a ramp in full sun can be too hot to hold, which is worth telling the contractor before the design is drawn, because the fix here is shade or siting rather than a steeper slope.

What Tucson's housing stock means for aging in place

Tucson carries the metro's oldest housing. The in-town grid is largely mid-century to 1980s single storey on a slab: two or three bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, a tub-and-shower combination in a small hall bath, a doorway of 28 to 30 inches, and tile or sealed concrete floors that are hard and genuinely slippery once they are wet. The walls in the 1947-1975 houses are concrete block or brick veneer, so grab-bar blocking has to be added rather than found, and widening a doorway means cutting and re-framing. The soil underneath is caliche over expansive clay, which swells with the monsoon and shrinks again in the dry months, so foundations move and a slab that has settled shows up as a bathroom door that no longer swings or a floor that slopes toward one corner - a detail the contractor has to see before quoting a recessed shower base. The floor plan almost always has a step somewhere the household stops noticing: down to the covered patio, up from the garage, or a threshold at the front door. Evaporative coolers add their own point, because they raise the indoor humidity through the monsoon weeks in a way a refrigerated system does not. There are no basements in this market, which removes the whole class of crawlspace and moisture problems that come with them, and the newer and rebuilt houses carry doors closer to 36 inches, which changes the price because the doorway may not need touching at all.

What accessibility work does a Tucson home need most?

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Sources

Aging in Place tools & calculators

Aging in Place resources