Blind Activist’s Vision Spurs Housing Project

Paula Margeson is blind, as was her mother, her grandmother and family members stretching back nine generations.

Margeson’s second daughter is also blind. The Anaheim woman knows all about the inconveniences that someone with a disability encounters. While a psychology student at Cal State Fullerton, she said, she spent more time on buses getting to school than she did in classes.

And so it was with a smile and a sigh of relief that Margeson, at ground-breaking ceremonies Friday, lifted a shovel of dirt on the Anaheim site where Orange County’s first apartment complex designed specifically for people with disabilities will be built.

‘To Live Independently’

“We are dedicated to the philosophy that disabled people have the right and the responsibility to live independently in society,” said Margeson, the driving force behind the project.

Without such housing, many people with disabilities are forced to live in institutions, with their parents or in nursing homes. Margeson estimated that there are 240,000 people with disabilities in Orange County, about 60,000 of whom are physically disabled.

For Margeson, as for the staff and volunteers of the Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled and Anaheim Access, the project culminated five years of paper work, phone calls, planning and hope. The McIntosh Center, one of 200 independent living centers, provided the seed money and got the project under way. Anaheim Access was created to build the housing. For most of the McIntosh Center staff and volunteers, the housing project took on a personal interest because most of them have disabilities.

‘It’s an Avocation’

“It’s not just a vocation for me, it’s an avocation,” Margeson said. “That’s the same for a lot of people here because we all know what it’s like to be dependent on other people. It’s something we put our hearts and souls into.”

The 40-unit apartment complex at 3050 Frontera St. will feature roll-in showers, adjustable kitchen counter tops, wider doorways for wheelchair accessibility, Braille markings on ovens and thermostats, doorbell and smoke alarms with blinking lights for the deaf and special grooves on the sidewalks for the blind.

Only the fifth such complex in California, the project overcame several hurdles. The Department of Housing and Urban Development rejected several early requests for funding. Hundreds of Westminster residents objected when plans for the apartments then planned for their city were announced three years ago, said Greg Winterbottom, founding chairman of the McIntosh Center, a nonprofit corporation in Garden Grove.

The two buildings, with 26 one-bedroom units, 10 two-bedroom units and 4 three-bedroom units, are mostly subsidized by a $2.5-million HUD grant. The City of Anaheim contributed $120,000 and the county $238,000, in addition to time and support from both staffs.

By next March, Orange County will lead the state with the construction of a second housing project for the disabled when the Rehabilitation Institute of Southern California in Orange gets another 40-unit project under way, director Praim Singh said. The private nonprofit corporation, which provides services to 200 to 500 people a day already, has received a federal grant for the $2.2-million project, Singh said.

Hard for Other People

For Margeson, being blind is “no big deal.”

“Blindness has been in my family for 10 generations,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of time to get used to this business of being disabled. But it’s hard for a lot of other people--especially when you can’t get into the bathroom door because the door is too small and the wheelchair is too large.”

The movement for independent living for the handicapped swept the country at about the same time the civil rights movement of the 1960s took hold, Margeson said. The McIntosh Center was formed as a result of a phone call in 1977 from a handicapped person who couldn’t find adequate parking at South Coast Plaza, Winterbottom said.

Winterbottom, a paraplegic following an auto accident in 1966, began to research what services were available to those with disabilities while working for former county Supervisor Laurence Schmit. What he found was bleak, he said.

The McIntosh Center began as a staff of three and a budget of $52,000; it grew in eight years to a staff of 30 and a budget of $900,000, subsidized mostly by state and federal money, said Margeson, who began herself as a volunteer and held different positions until assuming her current position of programs director. She also is vice president of Access Anaheim.

L.A. Foundation Helped

The Housing Retirement Foundation of Los Angeles, which has a track record of housing projects for the elderly, helped the groups get the federal funding by becoming a co-sponsor, McIntosh Center spokeswoman Peg Hall said. Access Anaheim is made up of members from both the McIntosh Center and the Los Angeles foundation, she said.