Why Aren't Earthships Everywhere by Now?
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Earthships put Taos on my map 40 years ago, back when I was a teenager flipping through the 1986 edition of The Essential Whole Earth Catalog. I dreamed of building one someday.
If you’ve never heard of Earthships, they’re partially buried homes. Usually in a D-shape, the curved side is a wall of stacked tires rammed full of dirt, then buried on the backside with a berm. The straight side is all south-facing windows. Done right, passive solar and thermal mass work together to keep a comfortable temperature year-round—no furnace or AC needed. Add solar panels and rain catchment, and you can run largely off-grid with minimal to no utility bills. Mostly built of trash and dirt. Pioneering idea.
They tend to be pretty, too, with indoor gardens behind the glass wall, colorful stucco work, and artistically curved, non-supporting walls made of reclaimed glass bottles and mortar—kinda like stained glass.
While I never followed through on plans to attend Earthship Biotecture and learn to build them, I did stay in one years ago. It was 2000. My then-fiancée and I rented one for the night—at top dollar, mind you—while passing through Taos on a road trip.
It was wonderful and worth every penny. I’d never slept in a house that felt so still and clean. The air smelled like earth, sun-warmed wood, and green plants. No plastic carpet smell. No stale ductwork funk. Just quiet and fresh.
Fate is a funny thing. Now I live on the Taos West Mesa, only 2 miles as the crow flies from Earthship Biotecture and the Greater World Earthship Community. I pass those houses every time I head to town.
When I bought Hippies End four years ago, I didn’t have a house plan. Kind of an impulse buy. My mind quickly turned to building an Earthship or something similar to finally live the dream. What I quickly realized was: Wow! That’s going to be a lot of work!
It was just me—limited tools, limited skills, limited money—and just a few months before the first snow. So I gave up on earthen building, bought a cabin shell sold as a “shed,” finished out the inside, and Bob’s your uncle—I had a livable place in time for winter.
And you know what? I managed to get most of what Earthships promise—no utility bills, near self-sufficiency in heating, electricity, and water—for a fraction of the time, labor, and cost. That’s when I started questioning the unassailable excellence of Earthships. I still think they’re pretty cool, but they’re not perfect. They have their tradeoffs, like any technology.
The biggest tradeoff is labor. Earthships take a lot of it—before and after the build—and you’re going to pay for it with your back or your wallet.
Recent estimates for Earthships built with hired labor run about $250–400 per square foot, sometimes more. Pounding dirt into tires takes a lot of manual work. If you do it yourself—maybe with buddies paid in beer and pizza—that’s time you could be earning better pay. And if you hire people, they’re not going to be cheap—not in this economy, where even entry-level fast food jobs pay enough to make hard labor a hard sell.
Some builders get around the labor problem with workshops and volunteer crews, trading time and coordination for cash. That can work, especially if you’re plugged into that community. But it’s still a lot of time, coordination, and people willing to show up. For most folks, that’s not a small ask—it’s a lifestyle.
Experienced builders say a single tire can take 20–30 minutes to pack properly. Multiply that by 800–1,500 tires for a mid-sized Earthship, and you’re looking at 300–500 hours just pounding tires. That’s weeks of full-time work—and that’s only the walls. You haven’t even started on the rest of the house, or paid for those big south-facing windows.
A conventional new home in 2025 is often closer to about $150–250 per square foot, depending on region.
Earthship promoters will tell you the higher upfront costs pay for themselves in a lifetime of utility savings. That might be true. Over decades, avoiding utility bills and maintaining HVAC systems might shift the math for some owners. But upfront costs still matter. Most prospective homeowners aren’t exactly flush with cash. Even if they can get financing, there are limits to what they can afford to put down and pay each month.
And labor isn’t the only barrier. Earthships can also be harder to permit, finance, insure, and resell. Banks like houses they can compare to other houses. Inspectors like systems they’ve seen before. When every build is custom and unconventional, it’s harder for anyone to sign off on it. That doesn’t make Earthships bad—but it does make them harder to get built in the first place.
Oh, what did my little cabin cost, by the way? [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/p/building-my-tiny-cabin-off-grid-and-for-cash] Less than $120 per square foot for near-complete solar power and basic water independence.
Granted, my tiny cabin can’t quite perform like an Earthship. I don’t have thermal mass to stabilize indoor temperatures—though passive solar and an electric mattress pad keep me warm in winter, and a swamp cooler takes the edge off in summer. I collect enough rainwater for my needs, but I don’t have plumbing or graywater and blackwater systems for in-house treatment. And I don’t have the in-floor, indoor garden or the pretty custom bottle and broken tile walls.
So no, it’s not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. What I built works for me—but it’s a simpler, more minimalist version of off-grid living than what Earthships aim for.
Still, it was much cheaper and much easier to put together as an owner-builder.
I didn’t do anything brilliant. I just paid attention to orientation, insulated the hell out of it (rockwool, not fiberglass—mice won’t nest in it), and made a few smart choices. I don’t see any reason most people couldn’t get similar results with conventional building techniques, especially if they borrow a few tricks from passive house design.
Makes you wonder why anyone would build an Earthship at all, doesn’t it? When you can get a good-enough off-grid setup with much less effort and money? It goes a long way toward explaining why they’ve stayed niche.
Then there’s the other kind of labor: keeping the thing running.
The problem is that everything is custom and unconventional. If your AC goes out in a normal house, or you need new siding or roofing, there are competing companies to call. But who are you going to call to fix a crack in your bottle-and-mortar wall? Or troubleshoot an unconventional graywater system?
You might find someone. But it’ll likely be harder, slower, and more expensive. Or you’ll end up doing it yourself.
That’s fine if you enjoy that sort of thing—and if you’ve got the time and strength of body for it.
Most people, sooner or later, don’t.
They’re also more climate-sensitive than the marketing suggests. The passive solar and thermal mass work beautifully in dry, sunny places like Taos, but in wetter or cloudier climates, builders have run into persistent moisture and ventilation problems.
Earthships aren’t perfect. No building technology is. In practice, labor ends up being their biggest limitation—but the other hassles matter too.
Even if you want an earthen house, other approaches like adobe, rammed earth, and earthbags can be cheaper, easier to build, and easier to get approved—depending on where you live. New Mexico, for example, actually has alternative building codes that accommodate some of these technologies.
Few are as pretty as Earthships, though, I’ll admit. Sure wouldn’t mind a tropical garden growing out of my floor and fed on kitchen graywater, huge banana plants and all—not to mention the gorgeous, custom design work so many owner-builders create.
And to be fair, there are people who’ve lived in Earthships for decades and swear by them, especially in places where the climate suits the design. For them, it’s been worth every blister, every backache, and every penny.
But in the end, most people aren’t looking for a house that doubles as a long-term project. They want something affordable that works and makes their lives easier.
Earthship designers never quite figured out how to make that happen for most people. That’s their Achilles heel.
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