Interesting piece in the NY Times today on lawsuits citing violations of the American With Disabilities Act (ADA):

“The lawyers are generally not acting on existing complaints from people with disabilities. Instead, they identify local businesses, like bagel shops and delis, that are not in compliance with the law, and then aggressively recruit plaintiffs from advocacy groups for people with disabilities.” Read more here.

We reported on this phenomenon in the Mission District, where the lawsuits are putting pressure on small business owners.

The NYT reports that the same sorts of lawsuits are hitting business owners elsewhere and, as is the case in the Mission, the owners are rarely given the time to remedy their accessibility problems before being sued.

Interesting questions on who should pay for the changes — tenants or owners — and whether the lawyers are pressing the lawsuits to make easy money or to make sure that the promises of the ADA are actually realized.

Views?

I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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