Owning a home in America keeps getting further out of reach. According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, the median-priced US home now sells for about five times the median household income, far above the price-to-income ratio of 3.2 that was typical throughout the 1990s. Against that backdrop, one Oregon man's decades-old decision to skip the housing market entirely feels newly relevant. His name is Bruce Campbell, and home, for him, is a retired passenger jet parked in the woods outside Portland.
From a plan for freight vans to a plan for a plane
Campbell is a former electrical engineer. In his early 20s, he bought 10 acres of wooded land near Hillsboro, Oregon, paying around $23,000 for the property, according to Reuters. His original idea was to build a home out of old freight vans. That changed when he heard a radio segment about Jo Ann Ussery, a Mississippi woman who had already converted a Boeing 727 into a lakeside home, complete with bedrooms and a hot tub. Campbell has said the story amazed him so much that he was making phone calls about buying his own jet the very next morning.
