“ Purely from a financial aspect, it would be cheaper to build a homeless shelter with wood than build a complex shipping container building.“
That’s a misnomer- a shelter is not a home - which presumably an individual container building would be.
Though an old fashioned mobile home would probably be cheaper and more live able than either. And way cheaper than a “tiny home”.
They’ve apparently never heard of condos.
Still,
I assume the builders here have done the math… otherwise… 
Apparently, shipping container pools are a thing:
Ah yes “hipster”. It’s the butthurt screech of the smugly closed-minded who can’t bear the thought of someone doing something that isn’t exactly what they would do. Experimentation and innovation are good. Not all experiments are successful, but doing them is important. If it weren’t for that you wouldn’t be sitting inside a building on a chair using a computer for telecommunication.
Shipping containers are big steel boxes that don’t last forever. Sometime between them not being used to take carry junk from one country to another and rusting away completely they are still structually sound and can be used to hold other things like shops, data centers, and the stuff you would put in a house. That isn’t recycling. That’s re-using. And it can be economical. When we have re-used shipping containers they cost less than building from scratch. Paint or add siding. Cut out holes for roof vents and windows or doors, and the storage unit or workshop was ready to go for less than what it would have cost to use traditional materials.
But please, tell us how it doesn’t work and costs more and we should rip off the libs to own them. #MAGA.
They have, but you know, not twee and edgy enough.
Meanwhile, condo developers in desirable and walkable urban centres are milking the “tiny home” trend by trying to convince less privileged young people to pay a premium to live (and now work) in 400SQF-minus “micro condos”.
Funny…I was thinking that a “home” mobile, container, or otherwise would always be more expensive in the long run than a “shelter”. The former implies taxes for property, the later may skirt that portion of the cost.
It will be interesting if we see growth in various types of home construction and how these things effect the tax and property legislation in town, state, and federal levels.
Not always. Recycling that steel to be used again might have a friendlier carbon footprint. That’s one of the arguments against using so much steel in construction, where it will be tied up for 50 to 100 years, and difficult to reclaim after. Some argue that using that resource for shorter term goods, like appliances or cars makes more sense, environmentally. Kind of keeping the raw material cycling through the system.
Los Angeles recently did a big study on that, and found that the least expensive way to address homelessness is literally to build a home for every person experiencing it. It was cheaper than everything currently being done with shelters and policing.
That’s easy to say, but the devil is in the implementation. The trick is doing that without it turning into a housing project, because we all know how that went last time.
This discussion isn’t really about using them for storage sheds or portable data centres, though. It’s about using them as spaces where humans live and work. As the video shows, making them habitable requires a lot more time, effort and money than for the other uses, with the cost-benefit analysis being way off in all ways in the final accounting.
You are, but if it takes more resources to reuse it and won’t last, then you’ve increased the waste stream and just time shifted it. A storage building is going to have different needs than a structure for occupancy.
Given the tendency to place them on lower density land than a traditional smaller house or apartment, they actually manage to often be higher cost and less sustainable at a macro level. Relatively little of the cost of a house is in the aspects that tiny houses save on.
I think it’s hard to sell the notion that the most environmentally sustainable house to live in is almost always the house that’s already built. Everybody wants to be the cleverest person around, and building a bespoke tiny house to go on an acreage instead of living in an apartment building is one way of doing it.
RVs are more practical in many cases, but I think it’s not accurate to say that tiny homes are worse in every way.
Many of the trailer-based ones are really only on trailers at all for two reasons: so that they can be built off-site, and so they don’t count as permanent structures to avoid property tax / building permit implications. YMMV but to me the well-built ones are often much more aesthetically pleasing than an RV, and if I was to need a guest house for my mother-in-law, for example, I’d certainly consider building something like that for the back yard rather than parking a big RV or camper trailer long term.
I’ve wanted to believe that shipping container homes were a good idea, they certainly look cool when done well, but I’ve come to realize shipping containers are only good for emergency storage-- they can be dropped in place and used immediately.
For that use-case I would suggest one of the many very well designed and well made Manufactured Homes. They come in all shapes and sizes and are designed for the “I may move it once or twice” use case.
I hear what you’re saying, but to my eye, I can’t see any practical niche that tiny homes are filling besides “I want to be surrounded by wood and feel like a hipster hobbit”.
Storage units could easily be turned into rather basic micro condos, seems to me. It was good enough for Hiro Protagonist, after all…
I used to live in a community that had a wide array of ‘home’ concepts. Many people lived on boats, some on float homes anchored remotely, and quite a few were in cabins they had built on ‘Crown’ (federal) land. At the time I lived on a 36’ houseboat.
The homes varied from utter squalor to gorgeous, depending mostly on the labour input. Some were definitely privileged young people ‘slumming’ for a bit. Others had been there for decades and are likely still there, in quite comfortable off-grid homes. It is possible to create a non-conventional lifestyle for yourself if you are willing to put in the work. After a few years I decided I was not cut out for it, sort of, and went a different direction.
That place was decidedly not urban. Most of the people, short and long-term were living in borderline abject poverty (though some grew weed in large quantities). Life like that in the city is basically slum bordering on homelessness. Not viable for most.
You could use an old tram frame to do nice things
I’m missing something here. Please explain the fundamental difference between a trailer-based tiny home, which you hate, and a trailer-based small manufactured home, which you’re apparently a fan of. I don’t see a difference other than the fact that the manufactured home costs more and is architecturally less interesting than one I would build myself.
I agree. Of course, having a regular job gets in the way of the home-building labour inputs, but if that’s also part of the non-conventional lifestyle then why not?
The vast majority of the people featured in tiny home videos and articles are very privileged in terms of financial and social capital and are definitely not building on public land but on rent-free parcels owned by them, by their parents, or by close friends. They’re also usually not scrounging for materials or labour but having both provided gratis or at cost by people they know.
If the “tiny home” advocates are going to continue claiming that “anyone with character can live this way”, I’d rather that they feature communities like the one you used to live in. That way people can see the real-world trade-offs and sacrifices that non-privileged people have to make to live in a (not always so cute) tiny home.
Not sure if I am missing some sarcasm but you realize that is a book about how dystopia is going to cause that to be the case for most people, right? I just can’t hear it though the text?
