The American dream of owning their own home has turned into a nightmare for the Loglisci family.

In 1996, Michelle Loglisci and her family began building a home for themselves in Monson. Loglisci raised two children in the house, and after paying off the mortgage in 2017, she and her husband were waiting to retire, with a plan to sell their house to their son.

Three months ago, Loglisci found out that her home of 22 years is valueless because its foundation is crumbling.

“Our home has no equity,” she said.

The Loglisci family is just one of many in western Massachusetts and Connecticut dealing with crumbling foundations that have left their homes worthless.

The first reports of rapidly deteriorating foundations came in 2001 in Connecticut, and the faulty concrete was traced back to a quarry in Willington, Connecticut, owned by JJ Mottes, a company that closed in 2017.

The concrete produced at the quarry was found to contain a chemical called pyrrhotite, a mineral which reacts with water and causes concrete to crack and fissure, according to news reports out of Connecticut.

The quarry provided concrete to many homes built in western and central Massachusetts as well as northern Connecticut, where the Connecticut Department of Housing estimates that over 35,000 homes have foundations which are deteriorating rapidly. The extent of homes with potentially faulty foundations in Massachusetts is still largely unknown, said Ryan Migeed, a spokesman for state Sen. Eric Lesser, D-Longmeadow.

Lesser proposed an amendment to the state budget that aims to create a commission to deal with the issue of crumbling foundations. The amendment was approved by the Senate last month and now heads to the House for consideration.

“People are stuck in a terrible situation,” Lesser said in a statement. “They are being told that their most precious asset — the home they saved for and built equity in — now has no value. We need to figure out how extensive this problem is in our state, how many home are affected, so that we can begin to provide relief and assistance to homeowners.”

One of the main purposes of the commission will be to figure out the extent of the problem, Lesser spokesman Ryan Migeed said. He said the commission is the first step into crafting legislation that may ease the financial burden on homeowners dealing with crumbling foundations caused by bad concrete.

Loglisci said that she hopes the commission will “get the ball rolling,” as their insurers have not and will not cover the crumbling foundation. She estimated that it would cost around $200,000 to have the foundation repoured.

Connecticut has already crafted legislation to deal with the issue. According to the Connecticut Department of Housing’s website, the legislation “provides a framework to assist owners of residential buildings with concrete foundations damaged by the presence of pyrrhotite.” The law also created a nonprofit insurance company to help homeowners repair or replace crumbling concrete foundations with the lowest possible amount of borrowed funds.

According to local Realtor Michael Seward, who has written extensively about the crumbling foundations issue on his blog, westernmass properties.com, Massachusetts homeowners need to organize to receive compensation to fix their homes.

Seward said he has little faith in the commission and Massachusetts officials to do the right thing.

“I think the commission is being formed so area legislators can say they are doing something about it without proposing legislation that actually does something about it,” Seward said.

Seward has said on his blog that the Massachusetts Realtors Association and Massachusetts housing officials likely knew about the problem before it was made public, and didn’t do anything to address the issue.

“The Realtor association missed an opportunity to lead on this issue by alerting the public and getting the state to address it,” Seward said.

Seward also took aim at Massachusetts officials, saying, “I think they just failed in their jobs as leaders and public servants, as they often do. Homeowners with crumbling foundations don’t have the resources of special interests like the Realtor association to get legislators to do the right thing.”

For Loglisci, the lack of action on this issue can be traced back to a lack of publicity.

“The concrete trucks didn’t stop at state lines, but the news did,” said Loglisci, responding to why it has taken Massachusetts so much longer than Connecticut to respond to the issue.

The amendment to the budget which includes the commission on crumbling foundations will now be debated in the House chamber, before the final budget is passed on to Gov. Charlie Baker.

Even though their home of 22 years is now worthless, Loglisci said that her and her husband will continue living in it as long as they can.