Now here’s a story: a guy in Oregon has figured out how to turn the hulks of four to six former cars into cool little houses that cost between $100,000 and $250,000, depending on their size. The stories I read burble on to describe the incredible energy efficiency of the houses, how they are designed to be built by five workers in forty-five days rather than by the average fifteen workers in the average 225 days, and how rats and termites and carpenter ants and suchlike will curse and moan because they cannot chew their way through recycled steel, and how the houses take advantage of the biggest, heaviest recyclable product that pretty much everyone owns, and how the houses, called Miranda Homes, don’t look like gleaming metallic yurts, as you might think they would, but more like your regular old friendly suburban cottage, the kind where Donna Reed is beaming at the door and you can smell bacon and there’s a kid upstairs not doing homework, and I get so fascinated I track down the guy, and we have us a good talk.
– Orion Magazine