Ramstad: In Tower, Minn., a vision to quickly build sustainable homes turns real

TOWER, Minn. – Last week, three Norwegian carpenters taught three Minnesota carpenters how to assemble cottage-like houses that were shipped in parts from central Norway to this small town near where the Iron Range meets the Boundary Waters.

Late in the afternoon on the first day, one of the Norwegian carpenters walked up to Orlyn Kringstad, who arranged the project.

“He said, ‘Everything’s perfect,’” Kringstad told me two days later, as the roofs were going up on the two houses. “I had the biggest grin on my face.”

The next morning, two of the Norwegian carpenters and the CEOs from two Norwegian companies sat with a Duluth custom tile dealer, explaining how bathrooms in Norway are slightly lower than the rest of the house and slope to a drain — but that for the cottages in America, just the shower will slope. This was an intellectual property transfer on an international level, with metric measurements converted in real time on iPhones.

“My ultimate goal is to build a more resilient economy in Tower based on what has become the primary source of revenue for the city, and that’s tourism,” Kringstad said. “Forestry and mining are still here. But the question is, ‘What do we need to do to get businesses to establish here?’”

The starting point is places to live. The houses are the first of six expected to rise before winter along the channel that connects Tower’s small harbor to Lake Vermilion. If all goes according to plan, another 42 will be built next year on property owned by Your Boat Club, the Minneapolis-based firm that operates several dozen marina properties in four states. It aims to attract more people to the state’s fifth-largest lake, and to use its marina and services.

The 48 homes in total would be the largest development in the history of Tower, which formed in 1889 and today has about 200 housing units. Prices will range from the $200,000s for duplexes, or twin-home buildings, to between $400,000 and $600,000 for standalone homes.

“Getting access to capital in a small community like this is so hard because people just assume, and maybe correctly, that the return is never going to be as robust here as what you’re going to get in a bigger community,” said Marshall Helmberger, co-founder of the Timberjay newspaper and executive director of the Tower Economic Development Authority. “You really have to find people with a little different vision, maybe who aren’t completely focused on the bottom line, which is somebody like Orlyn.”

Like most of Minnesota’s smaller communities, Tower has been losing population for several decades. Tower went from 494 people in the 2010 census to 430 in 2020.

Eight years ago, it picked up two people when Kringstad and his wife, Marit, retired there from the Twin Cities. After arriving in town, they set up a Scandinavian gift shop. Two years later, Kringstad was elected mayor.

Serving one term, Kringstad learned a lot about the pressures on small towns. Now, at age 79, he has put together a project that could bring 100 or more people to live in Tower and possibly something more. “The endgame is to build a factory in Tower, where we can produce the wall units and create jobs,” Kringstad said.

Born in Minneapolis to Norwegian immigrants, Kringstad worked in Norway for a building products company in the 1970s. In the past few years, he reacquainted himself with Norway’s construction industry and learned about Tinde Hytter, a maker of factory-built cottages.

Facing labor constraints, the Norwegian company developed a process where two carpenters can build a complete kit for a cottage in two weeks, then two others can assemble it on a construction site in another two weeks. Tinde wasn’t contemplating international expansion until Kringstad knocked on his door.

“It’s hard to believe in November 2022 when Orlyn had this energy and this light in his eyes that he wanted to build houses in Minnesota. Why should I believe that?” said Audun Skattebo, CEO of Tinde. “Yeah, I had to think a little bit.”

Kringstad also recruited a Norwegian solar heating firm, Norsk BioVarme, to install its radiant floor heating systems powered by solar collectors in the Tower homes. Its CEO, Arne Veggum, surprised me by describing how efficient its system is, with water circulating at a mere 82 degrees compared to the 100 degrees-plus of older floor systems (let alone the 180 degrees of the water in the radiators at my house).

“Once we’ve proved that these are marketable, affordable and saleable, then we will move on to a number of other building projects and construction sites in different cities in the area,” Kringstad said.

Just before I left Tower, two people from nearby Biwabik stopped by and told Kringstad and Skattebo their community has five acres of open land where a school used to be. The pair promised to stop by to see how many Tinde homes might fit on it.

The past is prologue. In 1952, a firm called Modern Home Manufacturing opened a factory in Biwabik and for the next eight years built hundreds of single-story homes, mounted them on flatbed trucks and delivered them all around the Iron Range.