Social housing issues affecting autistics

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I will be participating in a United Nations workshop on the future of social housing this week, and I'm looking for input on how social housing issues might affect autistics in particular.

Please no general comments on the pros/cons or politics of social housing, but specifics on what's troubling autistics living in social housing and how social housing could be improved to be more accommodating to those on the spectrum.

Thanks.

If I live in supported housing, can I contribute? It's run by the council.

Council housing is social housing, sure.

*Noise is the key issue. Autistics have more sensitive hearing. I can hear almost everything my neighbours do. Soundproofing walls and floor in social housing and apartments should be mandatory. There should be a legal standard.

*Autistics should be given the opportunity to live in houses or bungalows as opposed to apartments. We have more need for individual space than NTs. I have live in social housing that was apartments and I became stressed with what to say to neighbours when I bumped into them in the hall. I would have felt a lot more happy and free to live to my full potential if I could have just walked out my front door and be right on the street like a house allows.

*This is just a general point. It may not affect Autistics specifically but it is important. A lot of social housing is cold and damp. This is because it was built decades ago, before standards were enforced. Now that gas and electric are so expensive making homes well insulated should be standard.

*The fear of crime is a big problem in a lot of social housing. The problem is worse in large blocks of apartments. When people can get access to other residents' doors easily without people on the street outside seeing it is dangerous. It can lead to people being extorted for money, being easily burgled and robbed and assaulted. Even some large streets of social housing consisting of houses have this problem. The best solution is to build only small areas of social housing and have them near private housing. Building social housing in an area far away from a city or town centre is also a very bad idea. It usually becomes a ghetto that attracts a lot of crime because it is out of the sight of the city and town's general population. And you know what they say: out of sight, out of mind.

I live in a council house with my family. The one thing I would say is that make sure the house is up to a decent standard and there is no damp/ rot as that's what our house was like when we first moved in a little over a year ago. Also I would recommend having the walls whitewashed and any old wallpaper removed as a) it is hard work to remove and some auties and aspies will not be able to do all the hard work b) the sensory issues involved might course a meltdown and c) the patterns might anoy the person with autism. Basically what I'm trying to say is make sure the house is low maintenance and needs little DIY and home improvements done to. At one point when our house was being done up things got so out of hand I wrote a letter to the local council explaining the problems caused by there incompetence ( our house was very dilapidated). But in the end all the hard work paid off and we now live in a nice comfy home.

The carers of this house are crap. They have no autism training and I cannot confide in anything with them because they either laugh it off or give me crap suggestions.

I live with two other period in this supported housing (the careers are off-site) and one, who is much older than me, keeps making sexual comments about me, despite me complaining to the carers.

The point is, I am autistic and this placement is grossly inappropriate for me, but there is no council supported housing like this for autism in my area; the only thing the council provides is for severely autistic people that need constant care. Nothing is provided anywhere for Asperger's and as I said, the carers don't even have a clue about autism.

Hear! Hear! I live in a ground floor apartment and the neighbors above me (and there have been several) are a nightmare. It's bad enough I have to listen to them tramp across my ceiling day and night, I've had to complain to the management about their partying and blasting their bass-thumping Hip-Hop through my ceiling at all hours of the night. Lately, they've taken to screaming at their 5 year old child, whose bedroom is just above my office, so on top of the noise is the anxiety of having to listen to trashy parents abusing their child. If I didn't drink myself to sleep at night before, I sure as hell would now.

I know I've lived in other apartments, with upstairs neighbors, and didn't ever hear them at all.

Separate, free-standing dwellings would be ideal, at the very least duplex type structures. Size is not the issue, I can live in a fairly small space, but proximity to other (loud, inconsiderate) people is very stressful. Perhaps if my neighbors were all other Aspergians it would be quieter.

Thanks everyone, this is very helpful and already gave me a few more concerns to mention during discussions at the workshop. There will be a great number of people from national and local governments and housing providers present, so hopefully some of them will listen and improve the situation at least for autistics within their respective spheres of influence.

I think the biggest issue is that there is not nearly enough social housing. Waiting lists for both social housing units and housing subsidy programs (subsidy goes direct to landlord or tenant) can have thousands of applicants and people can remain on the waiting lists for years (at least where I live).

Noise, lighting, ventilation and the use of scented products in common areas (olfactory sensitivities) -- all of these are huge issues for me.

I would also like to see a legal standard for sound-proofing, but it would be difficult to enforce without an absolutely massive influx of funding to renovate existing social housing.

Smoking should not be allowed inside of social housing buildings or individual units -- particularly in apartment buildings where it becomes virtually impossible to keep the smoke in the unit where it originated.

I think there should be some provisions to at least allow modifications (i.e. modifications are paid for and done by the tenant or people who the tenant hires, as opposed to being paid for and done by whoever runs the social housing) to units for people with sensory issues and other problems that impact their ability to take care of themselves, function in the world and just generally be okay . Even small changes like painting the walls in darker colors, using non-glossy paint and replacing fluorescent lights with non-fluorescent lights could make an enormous difference in someone's life.