In 1999, Oregon engineer Bruce Campbell bought a retired Boeing 727, moved it into a forest, and turned its cabin into his home

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.

Buying and moving a Boeing 727
In 1999, Campbell bought a used Boeing 727-200 that had just finished flying for Olympic Airways in Greece, paying about $100,000 for the aircraft. The jet, built in 1969, had logged around 43,000 flights before it was retired, according to NBC News. It was flown from Athens to the Portland-Hillsboro area, and workers removed the wings to tow the fuselage to his wooded property, then reattached them once the plane was in place. By his own account, the jet itself, moving it, and the years of work that followed on the conversion added up to roughly $220,000 in total. He calls the project the Airplane Home, and said that he was driven by a wish to save retired jetliners from turning into scrap metal.


What life inside a 727 actually looks like
The cabin and flight deck give Campbell roughly 1,066 square feet of living space, plus two cargo holds underneath that he uses for storage. He sleeps on a futon, has kept many of the original airline seats, and replaced sections of flooring with clear plexiglass so the plane's wiring and metal framework are visible underneath, according to NBC News. He has never divided the cabin into separate rooms, reasoning that an aircraft is already built to handle lighting, climate control and plumbing for hours at a time. By his own account, Campbell spends about six months of the year living in the plane, and welcomes visitors who want to see it, walking them across the wing and in through what used to be an emergency exit.

He is not the only one, and the planes keep coming
Reuters notes that Campbell is one of a small number of people worldwide, from Texas to the Netherlands, who have turned a retired aircraft into a home or another creative project. The raw material for more such projects is not scarce. According to the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, an average of about 650 commercial aircraft were retired worldwide each year over the past decade, and more than 30% of Europe's current fleet is expected to retire within the next ten years. Most of those jets are scrapped for parts and metal. Very few become someone's living room.

A quirky story that fits the moment
Campbell has framed his own goal simply: "Mine is to change humanity's behavior in this little niche," he has said, according to Reuters. His project began as one engineer's personal experiment, long before today's housing squeeze. But it reads differently now than it did in 1999. With home prices stretching further out of reach for many young Americans, stories about people who found a debt-free, unconventional way to own their home tend to land harder. Campbell is not telling anyone to go live in a jet fuselage in the woods. What his story shows is that owning a home outright, on your own terms, does not have to look like everyone else's version of a house.