A Clean Slate — The place you spend a third of your life shouldn't be making you sick.

00 The Urgency

Reading is facing record-breaking homelessness.

75%

Of those experiencing homelessness in Berks County are facing it for the first time.

22%

Year-over-year increase in emergency shelter use — the largest jump on record for Berks County.

257unsheltered

Summer 2025 PIT Count — the highest number of unsheltered individuals ever recorded in Berks County.

80%

Of unhoused Berks County residents have a job or some form of income — they simply cannot afford housing.

Source: Berks Coalition to End Homelessness · 2025 Point-in-Time Count

This is not a story about people who can't work. This is a story about working people who have run out of housing they can afford. And the housing that does exist for them — the cheapest, oldest, most neglected stock — is the same housing that is slowly poisoning them through contamination no one is connecting to their decline.

A Clean Slate exists at the exact intersection of these two crises. We are not building luxury units that promise to filter down. We are not building units that look good for ten years and rot from the inside. We are building healthy, durable, affordable housing in the communities that have been failed by every system that was supposed to protect them.

01 The Premise

The land remembers. Most developers don't ask what it remembers.

America's affordable-housing shortage and environmental-contamination crisis are usually framed as separate problems. They are not. The cheapest land is overwhelmingly the land with the longest exposure history.

Pre-1978 housing stock carries lead. Industrial corridors leave heavy metals, solvents, and PFAS. The Marcellus Shale region generates radiological waste the RCRA rules exempt. And inside every building, moisture, mold, and mycotoxins compound whatever came before.

A Clean Slate exists because someone has to ask what the land remembers, and then do the work to actually clear it.

02 The Standards

Three pillars. Every build.

All-Electric

No gas appliances, no combustion byproducts, no methane leaks. Full-electrification with heat pump HVAC and induction cooking.

Toward Net-Zero

Gas is removed completely from the equation — no combustion, no leaks, no carbon monoxide, no methane. Superinsulation, airtight envelope design, and heat-pump systems strive to bring every build as close to net-zero energy consumption as possible.

High IAQ

Engineered ventilation, HEPA filtration, low-VOC materials, no contaminated systems. Every tenant receives documented baseline.

03 The Science

An atlas of invisible threats.

Mycotoxins & Secondary Metabolites

Fungal secondary metabolites produced by Stachybotrys, Aspergillus, Penicillium, Fusarium, and Chaetomium — including satratoxins, trichothecenes (T-2 toxin, DON/vomitoxin), fumonisins, aflatoxins (B1, B2, G1, G2), ochratoxin A (OTA), roquefortine C, gliotoxin, citrinin, zearalenone, patulin, sterigmatocystin, and chaetoglobosins. All are secondary metabolites — toxic byproducts of fungal growth that are neurotoxic, immunosuppressive, hepatotoxic, nephrotoxic, or carcinogenic. MVOCs (microbial volatile organic compounds) carry these through indoor air. Their neurochemical and immunological effects compound with every other indoor exposure.

Secondary Metabolites · Neurotoxic · Synergistic

Heavy Metals

Lead, cadmium, and arsenic from pre-1978 paint, plumbing, soil, and the legacy industrial corridors that built Berks County — Cabot Corporation, Dana Corporation, Glidden Paint, Berks Landfill, the Douglassville waste-oil site, and the lead-acid battery operations scattered across Reading. Compounds with everything else in the indoor exposure profile.

Cumulative · Bioaccumulative · Legacy

TENORM & Radiological Legacy

Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material — the Marcellus Shale's RCRA-exempt radiological legacy. Reading historically handled radioactive waste from wartime and industrial processing that has never been properly addressed, characterized, or remediated. The legacy sits beneath neighborhoods that still house families today.

Regulatory gap · Reading legacy · Unaddressed

Radon & Daughters

Pennsylvania reads highest indoor radon in the U.S. We test and mitigate — not to "action level" but to ALARA.

Decay chain · α-emitter

EMF

RF & EMF Exposure

Proximity to transmission lines, cell infrastructure, data centers. Site selection considers every wavelength, not just molecular.

Non-ionizing · Siting factor

PFAS

Forever Chemicals

AFFF firefighting foam, industrial discharge, contaminated groundwater. PFOS, PFOA and unregulated congeners.

Persistent · Mobile

Asb

Asbestos & LBP

Friable and non-friable asbestos in pre-1980 stock. Lead-based paint — pre-1978 housing always carries it.

Regulated · Friable risk

Actinobacteria & Biofilm

The overlooked microbial layer protecting pathogens, complicating remediation, and amplifying mycotoxin persistence.

Microbial · Synergistic

μP

Microplastics

Building materials, textiles, and water systems contribute measurable particulate and chemical load indoors.

Emerging · Indoor source

The real pandemic is synergistic.

No single exposure tells you what's happening to the body inside. Mycotoxins potentiate heavy-metal neurotoxicity. PFAS impairs immune clearance of mold. Radon's alpha particles compound with lead's neurotoxicity. The body absorbs all of them simultaneously. A Clean Slate assesses the whole signal at once.

04 The Territory

Eight counties. One mission.

Berks County & Surrounding Counties

Berks, Schuylkill, Lebanon, Lehigh, Montgomery, Chester, Lancaster, and Dauphin. This is the most layered contamination signature in southeastern Pennsylvania: Marcellus Shale TENORM, legacy industrial corridors at Cabot Corporation, Dana Corporation, Glidden Paint, Berks Landfill, and the Douglassville waste-oil site. Reading's lead-acid battery operations left soil and groundwater signatures that persist. And Reading historically handled radioactive waste that has never been properly addressed — a legacy now sitting beneath the housing stock our most vulnerable residents are living in. Pre-1940 row housing stock dominates the inventory.

05 About

Built by an independent environmental analyst, not a developer who outsourced the question.

The cheapest land in America is also the most exposed. I'm not interested in building affordable housing that quietly recreates the conditions we're trying to help people escape.

Maria is the founder of A Clean Slate and an independent environmental health researcher with a self-directed body of work spanning mycotoxin and microbial chemistry, heavy-metal occupational exposure, PFAS pathways, radon and TENORM in the Marcellus Shale region, and the synergistic toxicology that holds them together.

Her practical focus is the gap most affordable housing operators never close — between Phase II ESA, abatement, and the actual indoor environmental quality tenants live inside ten years later. The company's licensing and certification stack reflects this: EPA RRP, HAZWOPER, PA Asbestos Inspector, Lead Risk Assessor, ACAC-certified, and contractor licensure in both PA and FL.

Maria Founder & Principal Analyst

06 The Partnership Approach

We don't build around Reading. We build with it.

A Clean Slate's development strategy is designed to align with — and actively support — the work the City of Reading and Berks County have already laid out for themselves. We are not arriving with a foreign plan. We are arriving as a partner ready to help execute existing ones.

Reading Comprehensive Plan

Our acquisition and development priorities are mapped against the goals of the city's Comprehensive Plan — concentrating reinvestment in the neighborhoods where the plan has explicitly called for it.

Blighted Property Strategy

We work directly from the Blighted Property Review Committee's inventory. Properties flagged by the city for intervention are properties we are equipped to acquire, remediate, and return to productive, healthy use.

Reading Parking Plan

Our site selection and design integrate the city's parking strategy — supporting walkability, transit alignment, and the downtown densification the plan envisions, rather than working against it.

CRIZ & Opportunity Zones

We prioritize parcels that fall within the City Revitalization & Improvement Zone and federal Opportunity Zones — channeling private investment into the geographies the public sector has already identified as priorities.

Economic Development Through Local Partnership

Workforce Training

We're committed to creating pathways into the skilled trades for Reading residents who have been historically locked out of the construction economy. Every project is a training opportunity — apprenticeship hours, supervised learning, and credentialed advancement.

Marginalized Communities First

Statistically marginalized communities — Black, Latino, immigrant, returning-citizen, and low-income residents — are not an afterthought in our hiring or training pipeline. They are the priority. The wealth that gets built on Reading's rebuild should stay in Reading.

Minority-Owned Business Partnerships

We actively contract with minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and disadvantaged business enterprises across the supply chain — from environmental services to skilled trades to materials sourcing.

Local Organizations Doing the Work

We partner with the nonprofits, community development corporations, faith-based groups, and grassroots organizations who have been on the ground in Reading long before we arrived — and who will be here long after any single project ends.

The fastest way to fail a city is to arrive with a plan that ignores the plans already in place. The fastest way to succeed is to read what the city has written for itself, identify where our capabilities meet its priorities, and get to work.