Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Wednesday, February 26, 2003Project Update
This update concerns my recent exploration into a colleagues suggestion of financing a home of my own by building a cluster of modest non-toxic adobe homes, the rental income from most of them covering the mortgage payments on them all. The chief complications with this idea have been the high cost of natural adobe construction -which hovers around $125 per square foot- and the need to compensate for that by getting immediate occupancy of the rental units.
Even though demand for non-toxic housing in the US is so extreme that the majority of people disabled by EI will become homeless at some point, it has been difficult to find solutions to these problems because people with EI like myself usually cannot commit to new housing unless they can try living in it for a few days. Making a house that, by composition, can meet the needs of most EIs is relatively straightforward but one cannot control all the elements of the outdoor environment and that can make the home unsuitable just as readily as its interior environment. So no one will commit to a lease before a home is actually built. (this is less of a problem for me because, being stuck in New Jersey, I could go to damn near anyplace else on the face of the Earth and it would likely offer an order of magnitude improvement in environmental quality)
Seeking a possible solution in lower construction cost, I have been looking into adobe-style housing based on pumice-crete construction. This is a well proven non-toxic building method that has been employed by a number of architects specializing in non-toxic design. I have been trying to get information on this from the leading Southwestern contractor working with this material; Pumice-Crete Building Systems of New Mexico. They have much experience working with the non-toxic housing specialist Paula Baker-Laporte and also offer boiler-plate home designs in the adobe style which are supposedly intended for the low-cost housing market. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to obtain information from this company due to that chronic flake-out effect that seems to plague all my communications with people in design and construction these days. However, I recently did finally get some more-or-less concrete cost information. They claim they can produce homes using this material in New Mexico for about $75 per square foot, a significant savings compared to natural adobe and for a material with much better performance. But without specific prices for the specific boiler-plate homes I still cannot work on a project cost estimate to submit to lenders. I continue to wait on trickles of info from flakey people.
This idea once looked very promising. I was very encouraged when my colleague in the mortgage brokerage industry discovered the surprisingly high credit rating I had despite income limited to SSI. But this has been dragging on for many months now and I am losing hope that this is going to prove feasible. It seems like just too much for oe person to pull together by proxy, especially when dealing with people who seem incapable of communicating except by face-to-face contact and with constant pestering to hold their attention.
Site Update
Added the page for This Web House and the Dream Catcher to the Gallery page. This piece describes my effort to seek commercial sponsorship for the construction of my non-toxic home using a multi-media web journal as a marketing venue for corporate sponsors.