Faces:

A place to call home

Project focuses on accessibility

Sarah Davidson lives in an apartment in Dubuque, Iowa, but it’s not exactly what she can call home.

Due to a progressive illness, Davidson gets around by wheelchair. Her apartment complies with the city’s accessibility laws. Yet, like others in the city with disabilities, she couldn’t use her kitchen until recently and her bathroom is “hardly workable.”

Sarah Davidson is raising funds to convert this 1897 building in downtown Dubuque, Iowa, into an apartment house for mobility-impaired women like herself .

“We thought, ‘We can do a better job,’ ” said Davidson, a member of St. Matthew Lutheran Church, Dubuque. So she decided to search for a building for seven low-income, mobility-impaired women—no small feat given that much of the area’s property is historic and hardly designed for this purpose.

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