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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

If the restaurant merely rents, how responsible is it for the landlord's property being less than accessible?

If the restaurant is in a Historic District, and the board/commission/whatever in charge of that is generally opposed to pro-accessibility changes - who (other than the lawyers) benefits when the restaurant ends up as a de-facto abandoned building?

If my "handicap" is a severe peanut allergy, should I be able to demand that every restaurant have a separate, peanut-free kitchen - with only certified peanut-free ingredients, etc.? (One can repeat this argument for other allergies, people whose personal beliefs require kosher/halal/vegan/etc. food, and so on.)

If there are (say) 100 restaurants in a city, what is the marginal value for handicapped people of forcing a 101th restaurant to spend $$$$ to qualify as handicap-accessible?

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> should I be able to demand that every restaurant have a separate, peanut-free kitchen

Why stop there? There also needs to be a separate nut-free section of the restaurant for dining. Inaccessibility is frustrating but nuts are deadly!

I kinda agree. If the restaurant rents then the landlord renting out their space as restaurant space should be liable

The restaurant owners chose to rent a property with knowledge that they were going to operate a restaurant on the property, and they also knew or should have known the accessibility requirements for restaurants. Why shouldn't they be liable.

As a generality, both the economy and the legal system work far better when the seller of a good (or landlord of a rental property) bears the burden of making sure that his goods/properties are in compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, etc. And "fit for purpose", etc.

If you wanted to rent an office, an apartment, or even a '5 x 10' self-storage unit, would you find it reasonable for Step 1 to be "hire a team of property lawyers and inspectors, to find out if the place I want to rent is in compliance with all current Federal, State, County, City, and Historical District laws, standards, rules, regulations..."? I'm thinking "no". "Accessibility" is one of many legal requirements for a restaurant, and very few of the people who might want to open a restaurant are property lawyers.

Isn't the property zoned for a commercial space / a restaurant though? And when you sign a lease for a commercial space it states what you're allowed to do and even what types of F&B businesses aren't allowed there if it's a strip mall.

And - if you want to make material changes to the property, then pretty much everything has to be pre-approved, inspected, etc. by both the landlord and the local municipality's bureaucrats and building inspectors.

If ADA ramps are mandatory for all businesses, which in theory they ought to be due to non-discrimination being a universal need — then the property is unfit for renting if it doesn’t have an ADA-accessible ramp, and penalizing the tenant allows the landlord to re-lease it over and over as each tenant gets shut down.

Penalizing the landlord is the only way to ensure that the lawsuit leads to curative action to the property rather than a tenant change without action.

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