Minnesota company builds underground houses for buyers seeking durability, energy efficiency

MINNEAPOLIS -- Growing up, Pete Bissonette always wanted to live in a bus or a cave.

The latter dream came true, at least in a sense.

Bissonette has one of the about 650 homes Mankato, Minnesota-based Earth Sheltered Technology has built since it began in 1981. The company, which has houses in the Twin Cities and Wisconsin as well as in California and Alaska, specializes in partly underground structures, basically man-made caves.

Underground homes, also known as Earth-sheltered homes, have been around for nearly as long as humans have, though the modern incarnation seemed to gain traction in the 1970s after the 1973 oil embargo and ensuing energy crisis, according to an article in magazine Mother Earth News. At the time, people were looking to reduce energy usage, especially when it came to heating and cooling their homes.

Underground homes have other benefits too, including durability — particularly in the face of natural disasters like tornadoes — and low-maintenance needs (no need to paint when dirt and grass covers the whole house). Perhaps that’s why Earth Sheltered Technology has produced the bulk of its homes, about 450, in the past 17 years, said owner Jeff Hickok.

Besides achieving his childhood dream, Bissonette’s other inspiration for building his underground home was the book “Earth Sheltered Housing Design,” published in the late 1970s by the University of Minnesota’s Underground Space Center. John Carmody, one of the leaders of the underground home movement at the time as a systems designer and environmentalist, oversaw the center and the book, which sold 250,000 copies, according the to University’s...