Difficulties with healthy housing community projects
for people with environmental illnesses (MCS or EHS)

 

 

Community housing projects for people with environmental illnesses face many difficulties. We here focus on the issues other than the choice of materials.

 

Keywords:    environmental illness, multiple chemical sensitivity, MCS, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, EMR syndrome, housing, projects, community

 

 

Housing that is safe and doesn’t make them sick is one of the top difficulties facing people with multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) or electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS). Building such houses is not terribly difficult, but managing such a project is not for everyone, especially when sick. And the people who need it the most are usually unable to work and have to live on a modest income.

 

The activities of regular neighbors that can be serious problems include dryer exhaust, barbecue grills, lawn pesticides, paint projects, cigarettes, all sorts of wireless gadgets, and much more.

 

This means people with MCS or EHS are better off living separate from regular people, whether in apartment buildings or individual housing neighborhoods.

 

Experiences

Several people have tried to get housing created for people with MCS or EHS. Most have failed, for a variety of reasons.

 

There is a listing of housing projects that failed, which is available through the link at the bottom of this document. The following comments are informed by these experiences.

 

Several project types

There are various ways to organize a project, they have all been tried.

 

The most common is to build or convert an apartment building and then rent out the units.

 

There have also been some “camps” where people could bring their own campers, or they could rent one. Some also had little huts for rent.

 

The third kind is development of an area, where people buy lots and build their own houses, or a developer builds houses to be sold.

 

It is possible to combine elements of all three project types. This may make the project grow faster.

 

Build it and they will come?

A common problem with projects where people have to buy is to get them to sign up. A lot of people express interest, but they want to “wait and see” before they commit their money. Few can afford taking the risk of buying a house in such a project, and then maybe be the only one there. People want to join a proven success.

 

And most people who are fully disabled by the illness do not have money to buy anything. They no longer work.

 

Rentals rarely sit empty, even the high-priced ones in Dallas. It’s much less of a commitment to sign a lease than to buy a house, and most can only afford rent anyway.

 

Dr. William Rea had eighteen apartments for his patients. Despite charging some $3000 a month, they were usually all rented out. He sometimes had to ask people to leave if they were not actively seeking his treatments, as they prevented new patients from coming from afar.

 

Rentals can also be an important stepping stone towards ownership of a house. They allow prospective buyers of lots to try out the area first and then house them while the house is built. It can easily take a year to build and off-gas a new house, and it is best if the new owner is involved on-site.

 

If a project is not in a city, the project needs to quickly get enough people moving there so they don’t feel isolated. The way to do that is to provide rentals right from the start. A couple of units will not do it. The Quail Haven project outside Tucson had a total of four units (including one neighbor down the street), and that was not enough to get a sense of community. How many are needed depends on the kind of people moving in, as some do not socialize.

 

The Snowflake community in Arizona is well established. The contact person there is contacted weekly by people looking for housing. What people ask for is rentals, not empty lots. Good empty lots are usually available, but few takers. It can be years between each new house is built.

 

Sometimes houses become available for sale in Snowflake. They rarely move fast, some have to sit well over a year before someone buys them. It has happened multiple times that a truly excellent house had to be sold to a “normie” because the seller couldn’t wait any longer.

 

Affordable rentals

The people who need this kind of housing the most are so sick they no longer work. That means they live on a reduced income.

 

The illness is very difficult to live with, and is falsely portrayed as illegitimate. This often results in broken families, so there is no spouse or other family to help pay for suitable housing. The sick are left to fend for themselves.

 

Many people get sick so early in their career that they only qualify for reduced disability benefits. In the United States, the payments can be less than $1000 a month, and top out at around $2500 (as of 2025).

 

Paying 50% of their income is about as far as people can stretch to pay for housing.

 

Financing

Financing these projects is difficult. Most projects faltered because of financing problems. People found a good project and then expected financing to be available quickly.

 

Banks are not interested in unusual projects with a lot of uncertainties. They also do not like covenants and restrictions on who can live there. They want projects they understand, and that they can foreclose and quickly sell if the loan payments are not made on time.

 

There are not a lot of rich people with money to spare and sympathy towards the sick people.

 

Two projects in the United States (in San Rafael and Snowflake) were fully paid for with Federal money. The one in Ottawa was financed by a church. The one in Zurich used several sources of private and government funding. Two projects in Sweden, that are now closed, also had grant-funding.

 

Some projects were financed by an individual with the sickess, who lived on-site and ran it as a business.

 

The successful projects that were financed by investors all had high rents. Their monthly rents were more than the entire payments of even high Social Security.

 

Grant money can bring the cost down, but it can take years to get that set up. Such fundraising must be started well before the project itself.

 

Developments where lots are sold to individuals to build on themselves will require very patient funding. That is extremely rare.

 

Public financing

Public financing brings the cost down, so the rent can be affordable for people on disability. Most governments do have funding for low-income housing. But they are not easy to get, and have a lot of restrictions.

 

They may restrict the cost of the project, even if you have other funding as well. This is to prevent “luxury projects,” but can limit the use of costly healthy materials.

 

Some programs have other restrictions that can cause problems, such as where the project can be located.

 

Outsider’s perception

A special problem is the terrible image of illegitimacy – that many people think MCS and EHS are simply imagined illnesses. This is a common problem for new and poorly understood illnesses. For MCS and EHS there is the additional problem that if they became “legitimate,” that would severely threaten the profits of powerful special interests.

 

As MCS began to become accepted in the late 1980s, the tobacco industry and chemical industry took action to turn the tide, as documented elsewhere on this website. Their campaign was very successful and became self-perpetuating with echo-chambers in the media and medical journals. It is impossible to obtain grant money for MCS research, unless the proposed study does not challenge the “all in their head” paradigm.

 

Something similar apparently happened to EHS, starting in the late 1990s, where the cell phone industry began attacking researchers who found alarming effects from wireless radiation.

 

This makes it extra hard to get financing for housing.

 

Finding the land

Finding suitable land is a major project in itself, that can take years. There are all sorts of considerations, such as zoning, air quality, neighboring pollution sources, climate, shopping, etc.

 

The funding source may also have specific requirements. If it is funded under a disability housing program, they may require strict wheelchair access features, such as a nearby bus stop.

 

Finding consultants

There is a darth of expertise on building housing for the environmentally ill. There are architects who build “green” housing, but that is not the same. They do tend to use lesser-toxic materials, but not necessarily what is sufficiently safe. And they emphasize materials that have recycled content or are “bio-based,” which are problematic because of contaminations and mold. They also tend to shy away from materials that are energy-intensive to manufacture, such as concrete, ceramics, and metals, which are the safest materials for people with MCS.

 

There are many academic experts on indoor air quality issues. It seems like an obvious choice to let them design a healthy housing project.

 

Unfortunately, there is a big difference between what works for office workers and what works for people with environmental illness.

 

Office workers are generally healthy, or at least healthy enough to show up for work. Their needs are much easier to meet than someone with an environmental illness. Many of these indoor air quality experts have not experienced that themselves, and do not understand it. Many of them think that if you avoid the most toxic materials and improve the ventilation, that is all that is needed. It is fine to install carpets and other toxic stuff, they think.

 

That attitude was the cause of failure of the Haubitzen MCS/EHS apartment building in Uppsala, Sweden. The sick people were never able to live there.

 

Ventilation and filtration can be a help, but never a solution. Most custom-built MCS houses do not have ventilation, as that can cause other problems (especially mold and hot dust), and those houses are built so well there is no need for ventilation other than in the bathroom and kitchen.

 

Contractors

Building contractors (at least in America) are used to speed being paramount, with quality coming in second. That means they tend to cut corners where it may not be noticed right away.

 

Someone who understands healthy house construction, and is committed to getting it right, needs to be present daily on the worksite. It can make the difference between a successful house and one that will sit empty for several years while it off-gasses.

 

If you specify they must use a particular caulk, you’ll need to provide that caulk to the worksite. Otherwise they‘ll use whatever caulk is the most convenient to them. The same goes with other important materials.

 

Painters are used to when they’ve finished the first coat, they start on the second coat right away. Some eco paints must fully cure before the second coat is applied, or they will stink for many, many years.

 

Someone will have to be there to make sure the painter doesn’t do both coats on the same day - no matter any promises.

 

Many American workers smoke, and they’ll drop their ashes and stubs where most convenient. People have found whole piles of stubs hidden inside walls of their houses.

 

It is probably not realistic to make the worksite smoke-free, but some have banned smoking inside the house and within fifty feet (15 meters) of it. And smoke breaks were provided.

 

Food trash attracts rodents, cockroaches, etc., which then “necessitates” the use of pesticides. To avoid food and packaging being left inside wall cavities, etc, the workers should not be allowed to eat their lunch inside the house either. Throwing trash is so ingrained (at least in America’s contractor community) that promises are not likely to be adhered to.

 

Inspectors

Building inspectors are there to protect your project against contractors cutting corners too much, and generally make sure the building is designed and built soundly.

 

Unfortunately, inspectors can also be a problem if you need to do something that is a little unusual, even though it is within the building code.

 

In some areas, the building inspectors are often contractors who have gotten a bit older and switched to an easier job. Some of these can be quite difficult if they haven’t seen something before on another worksite. Any manufacturer’s documentation, etc, may not convince. Appealing to the chief inspector, the county engineer or even the zoning board may help.

 

It takes a sustained effort

It takes a lot of work over several years to get a project financed, organized, approved, and built. It can take five years for a custom-built project. Finding a suitable lot can take years in itself.

 

Converting an existing building is much faster, but there is the risk that it’ll never be as good as a custom-built project.

 

Doing a project takes both skill and endurance. The people who need such housing the most tend to be sick and living in unsafe housing that makes them even sicker. Most of the projects that succeeded were done by people who were not sick themselves.

 

Later development

Neighborhoods develop over time, especially if there are empty lots on the edge of town.

 

The Ecology House in California got a new cell tower next door.

 

The Elrum project in Skelleftea, Sweden, started on the edge of town, but then apartment buildings were built next door and the radiation levels rose so people had to flee.

 

Special zoning

There have been attempts at creating low-EMF zoning so a transmission tower cannot be built nearby later on. This has especially been attempted in Sweden.

 

There have been enacted a few aspirational guidelines, but nothing with legal standing. And when developers actually show up, they usually prevail.

 

Long-term management

Who will manage the project after it is built? There should be some organization that is not dependent on just a single person. Several successful projects in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona were eventually shut down when the owner died or got too old to manage it.

 

Government funding will usually require that some sort of non-profit organization with experience managing housing takes ownership once the project is finished. This can be difficult to find.

 

The rental houses in Snowflake, Arizona, are managed by a non-profit organization that otherwise provides housing to recovering alcoholics. That’s a very different kind of clientele. There was a steep learning curve for the management before they understood that. There were lots of conflicts between the renters and management in the early years.

 

Rules

There must be rules for the people living there. They must be given to people up front and explained. People may not read them on their own.

 

The level of sensitivity varies greatly from person to person. Just like it is for regular people, many do not like restrictions on what they can do if it doesn’t benefit themselves. The illness doesn’t turn people into paragons.

 

Some tolerate essential oils and they’ll use them, even if it ruins the apartment they are in, and sickens their neighbors.

 

Cigarettes are extremely addictive and there are a few (very few) people with MCS who smoke. One moved into a rental house in Snowflake. He was eventually asked to leave, but the house had to sit empty for more than a year to off-gas afterwards.

 

Wireless gadgets are also very addictive. People who tolerate them will want to use them, even if it hurts the next-door neighbor. It is often seen as “too inconvenient” to use a laptop computer with a corded internet connection.

 

It is not fair that neighbors have to act as “police” or beg people to behave. There has to be rules.

 

MCS and EHS together?

It may not be realistic to have people with “only” MCS and “only” EHS live with shared walls. There will be problems complying with restrictions that people don’t see as benefiting them.

 

However, there is a substantial overlap, where people have both disabilities. In many such cases, one can be severe, while the other is not severe. Those people need housing too.

 

 

More information

A description of projects that faltered, and why, is at www.eiwellspring.org/multiunit/HousingProjectsThatFaltered.htm.

 

Articles about several housing projects that were actually built are at www.eiwellspring.org/multiunit.html.

 

2025.5