We were supposed to be living in pod houses

I grew up in Michigan and we would have loved having these as a kid! We built our own igloos from time to time, but this would’ve have been the ultimate winter club house. Closest we had was old ice fishing shacks.

That is very striking. Something straight out of a Tintin book. Thank you for sharing your fathers work.

I love that they have "faces".

Sounds like Clark Griswold's sled from Christmas Vacation.

Is there a cool story around how the person came to own such a thing?

Circular homes minimize the required material and the surface through which heat is lost or gained.

In normal places, there is no need to think about maximizing the land usage. People typically put a 2000 square foot house on a 10000 square foot lot. For a circular home on a square lot, that is 51 feet in diameter on a 100x100 lot. Each side has more than 24 feet to spare.

We really don't care too much about minimizing lot size. In most places, it isn't even legal to have a tiny lot. The excess can be trees or whatever, and most of us like it that way.

Also making fittings to fit curved or non standard spaces is much more expensive

The hexayurt is the more HN-style version of the yurt:

http://hexayurt.com/

In many urban and suburban parts of the USA there's specific ordinances against manufactured housing, because of shoddily built singlewide and doublewide "mobile homes" that people who already own property in the area don't want put in place, for fear of driving down property values.

Unfortunately this also tends to encompass the definition of many higher end manufactured homes, or even prefab/modular housing that might cost more than a stick built 1600 sq ft bungalow.

Homes cost what they do because we have a wide number of policies designed to keep housing expensive (how many politicians celebrate falling house prices, after all?).

Mobile/Manufactured homes are often de facto illegal (even if they're allowed in theory they're hard to get planning on) though it depends a lot on the area. If you were allowed to buy a plot of land and plop a mobile home on it for $50k what's going to keep you working yourself to the bone? (though zoning is a somewhat different consideration from mobile homes, and there are practical reasons for not wanting a bunch of scattered houses on big lots in the middle of nowhere).

There is still a fair manufactured homes industry but the ones people want look more like regular houses than space pods. See for example https://www.manufacturedhomes.com/blog/top-10-manufactured-h...

There's already a lot of work in "modular housing" and various sorts of "pre-fabricated" construction. It has something of a bad reputation, dating from the very early days. The UK had something of a plague of concrete panel houses that turned out to be defective: https://www.peterbarry.co.uk/blog/houses-of-non-traditional-...

Look at the www.monolithic.com floor plans. Because the domes are large, typical rooms will have 2 or 3 straight walls. It's only the exterior wall that is curved.

yeah the "pod house" was like the tv dinner of houses, a novelty product with little intrinsic value.

others like fuller's dymaxion home were explicit about why the odd shape was chosen: structural integrity in a natural disaster, maximize ratio of livable space to raw materials, economize the physical footprint, mix/max it so you can mass produce it cheaply and house the world.

The one major drawback I find in structures like these is that I miss right angles. They help me orient myself in a space. A spheroid may provide maximal volume for its surface area, but if your residents are going to be ill at ease for any reason, they'll never choose it for their home.

I think it looks better in windy weather - it doesn't have a large flat wall which will catch wind and potentially collapse.

When a house goes to auction and sells for very little money that says something about the house: the previous owners destroyed it. They probably took the stove, carpet, light fixtures and so on. They cut the pipes to get the sink out and left the water on while doing so: the resulting flood and the water bill are the bank's problem. Of course by the time the bank knows this the damage is done and the house is worthless.

If the owners know they are in trouble and have options and sense they will contact that bank. There are programs to skip payments (the bank makes a lot of money off these in the long run - but this is your best way to get out of a temporary problem). There are programs where the bank will let you "short sell" where the bank counts the house paid in full when you sell it for less than you owe (you lose your down payment so it isn't a good for you but it is better than the alternatives). The bank often knows of assistance for people in life trouble. None of these are possible though if you don't try to work with the bank.

Banks want their money back. They do not want to own houses. They do it - but only when they have no other options.

> why can't they bloody damn sell a property at market rates, cover the debt and leave the rest to the debtor?

That's what my mortgage contracts have specified. I didn't add the clause, it was a standard boilerplate contract.

BTW, buying a house at auction is selling it at market rate - the market rate being what people are willing to pay for it.

Quick cash. Selling at auction means guaranteed money in a matter of days. When the house is sold on the market, it can take months to sell it. In those months the bank is losing money as it's tied up in the house and not actively generating revenue. If the home owner has a mortgage of 50% against the home, it only has to sell for 50% market rate for the bank to recoup their investment fully.

The recession in the early 90s in Finland was partially the result of the collapse of the USSR (Finland had exclusive access to this market, despite being a Western democracy, since WW2) but also due to a banking sector that was liberalized too quickly in the 1980s without proper legal oversight and was giving out loans and mortgages like free cocaine to a citizenry who had no real experience of managing serious debt.

People took out huge loans using their homes as collateral - either to support unviable businesses or buy that new summer cottage or boat - and were dangerously overexposed, a bit like the subprime crisis in the US in 2008. The banks of course went into panic mode and clawed back what they could. I personally know quite a few people who lost their homes in this recession, and the country took years to recover.

I'm not an economist and so this is just a second-hand account of this period but it seems similar to what happened in Iceland in the early 2000s - too little oversight from government and too much greed and naivite from the people.

because it's a bank, not a real estate agent. they want to issue loans, not sell houses. the bank typically doesn't want to foreclose a mortgage if there's any chance you could continue making payments. if they do, the best they can hope for is just getting their money back. putting the house on the market for an extended period of time (and possibly paying an agent) just increases the chance that they don't get their money back.

if you go with a smaller lender you might be able to negotiate better terms for foreclosure, but anything you require of the lender that increases their risk will be reflected in your interest rate.

I someone could sell their house for a profit, they would probably choose to do that rather than letting the bank foreclose.

Short selling is another possibility, where the bank lets the borrower off the hook for some fraction of the principle.

This may not be the case in Finland but in the US the vast majority of mortgage loans are pooled into investment vehicles/bonds that separate the loan & mortgagee from the mortgagor with the day to day servicing and rehab decisions made by a third party lowest bidding servicer having incentives different from that of the bondholders. But for the intermeddling servicer the bondholders would almost certainly come out ahead by doing workouts with struggling homeowners but the servicers lack those incentives and often make money putting the loans into forced sale forclosures. 11 years ago we in the US went through this mess without learning the lessons that would have been learned had the powers that be decided to let everyone sleep in the bed they made rather than foaming bondholder runways with the bodies of mortgagors.

Many bank owned properties are listed for sale with a realtor. This is not uncommon at all. Foreclosed properties are usually listed at below market value for quick sale though. Not sure why they chose auction in this case. It might be because it was an unusual property. Any time you have an unusual structure or property it can be difficult to sell and difficult to appraise.

Because everything is bound to power and not to morals or law. The latter two are only sometimes and to a varying extent hurdles to the first. This is true in every social and political climate. Socialism doesn't make it better (actually may make it worse IMO).

That's why I believe that the only correct individual motivator should be to be free and strong. And never rely on the government, banks and other parties that can and will make you dependent. Take on as little debt as you can. Pay as little tax as possible and/or move to countries where this is possible. Possess as big and as diverse investment portfolio as you can. Reside in countries where it's allowed to possess guns and do so. Make friends with like minded individuals. Yes, I am a libertarian.