“He was perfectly willing to rip open walls,” Cavedon says of Anthony Pacillo, senior manager of Harvard Yard and freshman dormitories. “He made it possible to live independently.”

LIMITED ACCESSIBILITY

After leaving the Yard, students with mobility impairments find themselves constrained by the existing House infrastructure.

Currier, Quincy, and Pforzheimer are the only Houses accessible to students in wheelchairs, according to Neal.

Even these options, students say, are not ideal. Faraino was originally placed in Currier with her blocking group. However, she says, “I realized toward the end of the year there were certain obstacles to living in the Quad that I wouldn’t be able to overcome—obviously distance-related.”

Now, she is affiliated with Quincy House and lives in DeWolfe, though she takes the shuttle to visit her blockmates and linkmates in the Quad almost every day, she said.

Students with disabilities say that Harvard’s many inaccessible dorms make it difficult for them to visit friends and attend social events.

“It’d be great if they could make every single dorm accessible. That way I could visit friends,” Valerie J. Piro ’14 says, noting that in her wheelchair, she cannot access rooms in most Yard dorms, where vertical entryways centered around staircases are the predominant architecture. “I feel guilty asking friends to come here all the time.”

Even everyday socializing can be difficult due to the structure of many Harvard dorms. While Cavedon has lived in a single in New Quincy for the past three years, most Quincy sophomores lived in Old Quincy, a building with vertical entryways.

“I was one of three sophomores in New Quincy. Not being able to visit friends was hard,” Cavedon says of his first year in Quincy. “One of the things I enjoyed in Weld was flitting between rooms.”

For now, Cavedon’s solution to the problem of attending social events in inaccessible Houses is unorthodox: He relies on friends to carry his chair up stairs to parties.

“I haven’t ended up with anything broken yet,” he says. “Is it annoying? Absolutely.”

ACCESSIBILITY AND THE LAW

Both students and administrators say they hope Harvard will create more accessible living spaces as House renewal—the ambitious planned renovation for the undergraduate Houses—moves forward in the coming years. And under the guidelines of the Americans with Disabilities Act and state regulations, improving accessibility must by law be a part of the renovation plans.

State accessibility codes order that buildings be made fully accessible whenever a property owner undertakes renovations of a public building which cost 30 percent or more of the value of the building being updated.