United Spinal Association Accessibility Services

Architects, transit agencies, and venue operators bring United Spinal Association's Accessibility Services team into plan review so wheelchair users can enter stadiums, museums, airports, and housing before complaints force retrofits.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Design Accessible Experiences
• Builder-side Interventions → Test for Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Iterate to Address Shortcomings

What it is

United Spinal Association runs its Accessibility Services division out of Queens, New York, and sends certified accessibility specialists, architects, plan examiners, and code enforcement officials into construction projects at the requirement-setting stage, then carries that review into design, site assessment, post-construction qa-testing, and training work for projects that will receive wheelchair users after opening.¹² Vice President Dominic Marinelli has led the division since 1988 and the team has grown to nine members, including architects, plan examiners, and building inspectors who evaluate projects against the ADA, the Fair Housing Act, Section 504, and state and local accessibility codes.¹²

Clients move from blueprints to buildings and then into enforcement as United Spinal's reviewers follow each project through construction. The division's published project roster covers Citi Field, Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's airports and transit terminals, the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park, and roughly seventy-five to one hundred colleges including Cornell, Hofstra, North Carolina State, and Yale.² United Spinal's reviewers also sit on the technical committees that write the codes they later enforce. Marinelli chairs the ANSI A117.1 residential committee, worked to revise the International Existing Building Code so older residential buildings must consider accessible upgrades during renovations, and teaches accessibility codes through AIA- and ICC-approved programs.¹² Forbes placed Accessibility Services on its inaugural Accessibility 100 list in 2025 for work on stadium and arena access.³

Why it matters

Robert Moss and seventy other paralyzed World War II veterans gathered signatures at Grand Central Terminal in 1946 to push Congress toward the country's first accessible-housing bill, and that demonstration seeded the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans of America, the organization that now does business as United Spinal.⁴ VA hospitals and federal housing programs treated paraplegia as a private medical misfortune rather than a civic obligation, so veterans who had survived the war through new antibiotics and surgical care returned to a built environment that stranded them at curbs, doorways, and stairs.⁴⁵ EPVA turned that exclusion into a legislative program, helped pass Public Law 702 in 1948, joined the coalition that secured the 1968 Architectural Barriers Act, and later wrote portions of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.⁴⁵ The Accessibility Services division grew directly out of that arc. Marinelli joined EPVA in 1988 and built the division so veterans and civilian wheelchair users would not have to keep asserting rights after each inaccessible building opened.² Even after the ADA, enforcement depended on disabled plaintiffs filing suit. Paralyzed Veterans of America v. Ellerbe Becket Architects and Engineers (1996), the first major ADA stadium case, dragged the distribution of wheelchair seating at the MCI Center in Washington into federal court because the Department of Justice had not clarified sightline requirements for large venues.⁶ United Spinal's plan-review model traces to the same fight, now carried into the permit phase so arenas do not have to be sued after they open.²⁶

American architecture and construction professions still treat accessibility as a late-stage compliance check, and that habit delays care until after concrete sets. Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Amanda Morris at the Washington Post documented in 2024 how apartment developers in the Washington and New York metro areas continued to deliver units with inaccessible kitchens, narrow doorways, and unreachable switches despite Fair Housing Act requirements dating to 1988, leaving disabled tenants to endure inaccessibility or move.⁷ United Spinal's training work pushes against that norm by teaching architects and construction teams how to apply accessibility codes before permits go out, and the division's site assessments give clients a way to catch mistakes before they harden into framing.¹² Professional credentialing still treats accessibility as elective, so firms can ship projects to bid without a single certified reviewer on the team. When they do, wheelchair users carry the labor downstream, either by asking for human help at side entrances and service doors or by filing complaints that run years behind the damage.⁷⁸

Large capital projects such as professional sports venues, airports, and university campuses can afford expert plan review, and United Spinal's client list reflects that pattern. Major-league ballparks, Class A airports, and endowed universities pay for the early work that keeps them out of court, while smaller landlords, school districts, and municipal facilities often wait for complaints or Department of Justice enforcement actions because they lack the budgets, insurance incentives, or procurement machinery to hire consultants in advance.²⁸ The adaptation tax then concentrates on disabled people in lower-resource settings, who switch to alternative venues, route around inaccessible buildings, or accept whatever improvised help local staff can provide.⁷⁸ United Spinal's nonprofit model lowers the price ceiling for some clients and folds consulting revenue back into advocacy, but the division operates as a fee-for-service shop, which means the places that can pay for qa-testing continue to receive it first.² The division's leverage on the ANSI and ICC code committees does redistribute some of that benefit, since every builder subject to the updated codes inherits the accessibility improvements United Spinal negotiates upstream.¹²

Ed Roberts, Judith Heumann, and the disabled students who founded the Berkeley Center for Independent Living in 1972 built the political tradition that insists disabled people know best what disabled people need, and that principle runs through United Spinal's staffing model. Roberts and his colleagues framed disabled people as consumers rather than patients, and Aimi Hamraie's Building Access traces how that insistence reshaped design professions by forcing architects to treat disabled users as co-authors of the built environment rather than as problems for medicine to solve.⁹¹⁰ Marinelli uses a wheelchair himself, and the division publishes team biographies emphasizing lived experience alongside code credentials, which places disabled reviewers inside the specification process at a stage where professional norms usually exclude them.¹² Hamraie's account shows that universal design grew out of disabled architect Ronald Mace's critique of segregated accommodations, and United Spinal's plan review extends that lineage by treating seat sightlines, route distribution, and restroom clearances as design questions for disabled users to answer rather than minima for architects to meet.¹⁰

Cao, Walker, and Krause's five-year cohort study of 1,635 adults with chronic spinal cord injury found that a one-point increase in perceived physical and structural barriers predicted about 0.42 additional days of poor physical health each month and 0.45 additional days of poor mental health, while service and assistance barriers predicted roughly one full additional day of poor physical health and 0.64 days of poor mental health per point.⁸ Missed ramps, blocked routes, and poor seating plans accumulate as fatigue, pressure injuries, secondary infections, depressive symptoms, and reduced community participation because wheelchair users who must constantly reroute, transfer, or call for help spend more time immobile and more time exposed to skin breakdown, urinary tract infections, and social isolation.⁸ The distribution of that biological load tracks the distribution of inaccessible construction. People with SCI/D in lower-income housing, rural areas, and older public facilities carry the differential risk because the buildings around them were never reviewed at the stage United Spinal's division operates in.⁷⁸ Abandonment by permit offices that treat access review as optional pushes that risk onto disabled bodies rather than onto the builders, insurers, or jurisdictions that set the structural environment.⁷

United Spinal's plan-review practice has moved major venue owners, transit agencies, and university procurement offices to treat early access expertise as part of ordinary capital planning rather than as a post-launch fix, and the Forbes Accessibility 100 recognition in 2025 documents that shift at the upper end of the market.³ Code enforcement still leaves plan review optional in most jurisdictions, which means the division keeps filling gaps that public permit offices could close by requiring certified accessibility review before issuing building permits.¹⁷ Congress has not attached automatic funding to Fair Housing Act enforcement, and the Department of Justice pursues ADA Title III cases case by case, so private consulting continues to carry work that public enforcement could standardize.⁶⁷ Builders who accept access review as optional enhancement rather than a precondition for opening still set the pace for most projects, and disabled users absorb the difference in days of poor health.⁸

Real-world examples

In the news

How United Spinal Helped Build ADA-Compliant Stadiums, Airports, and More (November 2021)
-- Ian Ruder, New Mobility

• New Mobility documents the division's work on Citi Field, the Port Authority's airports and transit terminals, the San Diego Zoo, and dozens of university campuses, and reports Marinelli's role in revising the International Existing Building Code so older residential buildings trigger accessibility review during renovations. The piece places requirement-setting and qa-testing before opening day rather than after complaints arrive.

In the news

Forbes Accessibility 100: Accessibility Services (June 2025)
-- Forbes

• Forbes named United Spinal's Accessibility Services to its inaugural Accessibility 100 list in the "Modeling, Music and Movies" category, citing work on stadium and arena access. Major venue owners now treat early design and plan review as standard procurement rather than optional enhancement.

In the news

Disabled Renters Still Face Inaccessible Apartments Decades After Fair Housing Act (July 2024)
-- Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Amanda Morris, The Washington Post

• Reporters document disabled tenants in Washington and New York carrying the burden of enduring inaccessibility in new construction that should have been reviewed for wheelchair clearance, kitchen reach ranges, and accessible routes before permits issued. The story clarifies where third-party plan review would have prevented the harm.

In the news

Paralyzed Veterans of America v. Ellerbe Becket and Stadium Accessibility (1996)
-- Justia Federal District Court Opinions

• The District of Columbia decision forced the MCI Center's designers to revise wheelchair seating distribution at the plan stage, which established that stadium sightlines were an ADA design question rather than an operational one. The case made requirement-setting expertise economically rational for venue owners and fed demand for the kind of review United Spinal's division sells.

In the news

Governor Cuomo Appoints Dominic Marinelli to New York State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council (July 2016)
-- PR Newswire

• Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed Marinelli to the New York State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council, giving a disabled accessibility reviewer a seat at the table where state building codes move from draft to enforcement. The appointment documents how United Spinal's division reaches requirement-setting before projects ever reach a permit desk.

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the requirement-setting and design stages sounds like this:

• "We brought Accessibility Services in before schematic design locked the circulation paths."
• "The accessible seating plan needs to match the sightlines and the price map, not only the minimum ADA count."
• "The route from parking to entrance to restrooms has to work for a wheelchair user without a detour."
• "Our architect team needs code training before the drawings go to bid."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect sounds like this:

• "We will see what the inspector says after construction."
• "The code minimum passes, so we do not need another review."
• "Historic status makes the route impossible, so we will leave it as it is."
• "If people complain, we will handle it then."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor wheelchair users carry when access review arrives too late:

• "I called ahead, but the entrance still dumped me at the service door, so a staff member had to walk me through the back hall."
• "The museum has a ramp, but it ends at a side platform with no view, so I go back with a friend and ask them to describe what I missed."
• "I file complaints because the parking lot keeps getting blocked and nobody clears it until I push."
• "I keep a list of the places that work and the places I can only enter with help."

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All observations occur within the context of United Spinal Association's Accessibility Services division in Queens, New York, and its plan-review and code-consulting work on stadiums, airports, transit terminals, universities, museums, and housing in the United States.

Footnotes

1. Accessibility Services. "Meet the Team." https://www.accessibility-services.com/team/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Ian Ruder. "How United Spinal Helped Build ADA-Compliant Stadiums, Airports, and More." New Mobility, November 2021. https://newmobility.com/accessibility-services-ada/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

3. United Spinal Association. "United Spinal's Accessibility Services Honored by Forbes for Inclusive Design." June 17, 2025. https://unitedspinal.org/united-spinal-associations-accessibility-services-honored-by-forbes-for-pioneering-inclusive-design/ ↩ ↩²

4. Tim Gilmer. "How We Became United Spinal Association." New Mobility. https://newmobility.com/how-we-became-united-spinal/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. United Spinal Association. "Our History." https://unitedspinal.org/our-history/ ↩ ↩²

6. Paralyzed Veterans of America v. Ellerbe Becket Architects and Engineers, 945 F. Supp. 1 (D.D.C. 1996). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/945/1/1470124/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Amanda Morris. "Disabled Renters Still Face Inaccessible Apartments Decades After Fair Housing Act." The Washington Post, July 25, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/07/25/disabled-renters-fair-housing-act/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

8. Yue Cao, Polly E. Walker, and James S. Krause. "Environmental Barriers and Subjective Health among People with Chronic Spinal Cord Injury: A Cohort Study." Rehabilitation Psychology, 2015. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4612208/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

9. National Park Service. "Ed Roberts." https://www.nps.gov/people/ed-roberts.htm ↩

10. Aimi Hamraie. Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517901646/building-access/ ↩ ↩²