Plains Winds Haven’t Huffed, Puffed and . . .

The Arctic wind was howling down the frozen Mississippi River, around the giant Metrodome, focused all the way, it seemed, on a single house on 5th Avenue South--a house of straw.

Inside, Sherri Simmons sat grinning, eating half a sandwich, sipping an ice-cold orange soda and watching the outside bluster in her stocking feet.

“If it can withstand 35-below and wind, I’m good,” she said with a clap of her hands. “Yep, I’m good to go.”

In a city where the snow is often too cold to pack into a decent snowball, a longtime welfare recipient determined to turn things around, a low-income housing agency and a couple of ecologically minded builders got together and, using what would have been bedding in a barn, built a house.

Constructed of more than 1,600 bales and shrouded in preformed sheets of stucco, the two-story abode maintained a cozy 68 degrees on one recent day, even as Simmons’ heating bills have dropped by half. Located in a South Side neighborhood where the gunshots aren’t as frequent as they used to be, Simmons’ home looks a bit like a farmhouse and even offers the subtle scent of a Minnesota wheat field as workers hoisted 30 more bales into the attic to plug a minor draft.

“People who come here think it’s just cool,” Simmons said.

A single mother of three, Simmons spent most of her adult life living from government aid check to aid check, more than $600 of which went to pay the rent each month--and as much as $200 to pay winter heating bills. A couple of years ago, she decided she had had enough. It was time to straighten her life out, make a living, buy a home--and not a rundown one, either, or even a refurbished one. She wanted a brand-new home.

Simmons, who now runs a small child-care center, got in touch with a local low-income housing group and completed a first-time buyer’s program. The housing group, in turn, contacted the nonprofit Community Eco-Design Network, whose co-founders had been itching to build a low-cost, easy to heat, straw-bale house in one of the coldest cities in America.

“I had no idea what it would look like,” Simmons said.

An Experiment, but Not a New Idea

Simmons’ new home is an experiment: It took several tries to make the stairway fit, and workers still tinker eight months after construction began. But humans from Mongolia to Morocco have been sheltering themselves with straw for centuries, binding the hollow stalks of wheat, rye and other grains with mud and mortar.

In the United States, the idea first took root on the Great Plains shortly after the turn of the century. With little available stone or wood, people built homes, churches and schoolhouses--many of them still in use--from stuccoed straw bales.

“It isn’t such a wacky idea when you see trailer houses falling apart in three months and straw-bale structures standing after 70 years or more,” said Nebraska folklorist Roger Welsch.

A minor revival took place in the 1970s and ‘80s, with do-it-yourselfers building several hundred low-cost homes, most of them in Arizona and New Mexico and a few in Northern California.

“All the stuff in Arizona or New Mexico was in mild or hot climates,” said Eco-Design co-founder Eric Hart. “We had to adapt it to our harsh, cold climate.”

After convincing banks and the city’s building department that they knew what they were doing, Hart and architect Rick Peterson hired a group of untrained workers from the neighborhood--several established contractors had declined to get involved--and started building.

Building with straw, which provides exceptional insulation and also tends to block out more outside noise than traditional wall materials, does require certain unusual precautions. Although dense bales don’t burn any faster than wood studs, and rodents don’t have much of a taste for the grain stalks, water can rot the bales. To protect against damage, the bales in Simmons’ home are wrapped in heavy plastic.

Assessed at $83,000--and with mortgage payments about the same as her monthly rent for her former basement apartment--Simmons’ home cost about $140,000 to build. Housing agencies covered the difference with the idea that the Eco-Design folks would refine their techniques and eventually be able to offer cheaper homes in the area.

“It’s not perfect,” Simmons said as another bale landed with a thump in the attic. “At least not yet. But it’s all mine. And I love it.”