Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004Season of Crisis
The impending crisis I've anticipated these many years is finally at hand. I have finally run out of time. This past holiday weekend my elderly supporting relative -who has been struggling with illness since November- was hospitalized and diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was given "from weeks to months" and will soon be put into hospice care. Thankfully for her, this ordeal should be as short and as comfortable as could be hoped. However, for me this means that I now have an equally short period of time to find a solution to my housing needs or I will be homeless. My options are few and difficult.
Frankly, my decades long research into alternative and non-toxic architecture has proven to be a failure. I have failed to discover any technological answer to the one fundamental problem that has barred me from the housing I need; the fact that there is no known form of non-toxic housing cheap enough for someone on SSI (Supplemental Security Income) to afford alone. There are no government agencies, programs, or non-profit organizations I can turn to for help because the issue of disabled housing has simply never been very important to US society. (and before anyone wastes their time suggesting it again; no, Habitat for Humanity does not do adaptive housing for the disabled. HfH is not the kind of organization most people seem to think it is. They don't build houses for the poor. They build cut-rate houses for banks to coerce them into mortgaging them to the 'financially challenged'. No bank provides mortgages to people on SSI, period) I'm on my own.
With so little time now left, my options have been drastically reduced. Since the government doesn't allow SSI recipients to have any kind of savings, I had hoped to ultimately find a building technology that would allow me to incrementally stockpile light easy to handle components for a home or somehow be able to invest sweat equity here into modular components I could transport to the low-pollution locations I need to relocate to. But this simply never panned out. The building industry is just not sophisticated enough to produce anything suitable for this. Now my choices are limited to those things that can be made/purchased more-or-less immediately and that means two options; either I immediately find about two dozen people -at least some skilled- who will donate a month or more of time to build a home for me by hand using one of the several earthen or related building techniques, or I find someone who can put up a lot of money to pay for one of the few quick-build forms of non-toxic housing based on ferro-cement, excavated structure, prefab steel structures, or shipping containers, or even more money to buy one of the few readily available 'healthy homes' now on the market. (one can see most of that tiny market here) Even the limited choices among the quick build homes is now reduced. The two cheapest of the few non-toxic kit home products are now probably unavailable due to the Indonesian quake that struck this past weekened.
My emergency housing options are limited to two things; a small adapted Airstream trailer I found for sale a while ago (seen here) and a product called the ChuckHouse which offers a bit more room, comes with solar power, but is more expensive, more difficult to transport, and whose claim to being made exclusively of non-toxic materials cannot be confirmed because they would not answer any detailed questions on finishing materials. Both these are limited to very mild climate locations, would cost a lot to transport, and are too small to allow me to pursue any kind of work. So while they would provide emergency shelter, they are ultimately a dead end. And though I could afford one of them on credit, I may not be able to afford them and the land to put them on -and even if I could, I would probably have to buy land through the Internet sight-unseen and just hope for the best. A VERY scary prospect.
The situation does not look good. If any readers to this site can offer real help or some concrete viable suggestions (not off-the-cuff notions that haven't been thought out) I need to hear from you NOW. This is it, folks. This is the endgame. If only this were not such a primitive country, but then if it weren't so primitive I probably wouldn't have contracted this illness in the first place.
For obvious reasons, this may be my last post to this site for some time, if not for good. I now must concentrate totally on coping with my relative's last days and finding a way to avoid the same fate. Should I be unable to continue this site in the future, I wish to thank all the many readers who have to date offered their encouraging feedback and generous support.
