When I first became enamored with the idea of shipping container homes, it wasn’t even so much for the esthetic as it was for the idea that they would be cheap and sturdy. As she points out in the video, they are neither.
For the price of buying a piece of land and putting even the simplest shipping container home on it, you could buy a standard pre-existing house in most locations-- outside of the city where land is cheaper, the houses are cheaper too. The tiny homes that are cheap are basically mobile homes with no foundation (but maybe the way the world is going it’s better to have the option available to just pack up and leave.)
If governments really want to address homelessness then shipping containers are putting the cart before the horse-- instead of working backwards from shipping containers we prefabricate something similar that can be made in great quantity for little money and put up quickly.
It’s sad to see that pre-fab housing gets such a bad rap in the US. Pre-fab housing can be just as nice, and large, and customized as traditional on-site builds. They are also often considered much more sustainable since they can be built faster and with a lot less waste.
In the US, if you say “shelter”, people think of “homeless shelter”, which is usually some repurposed building set up as a dormitory. USians don’t like giving the homeless a place to call home, because capitalism and exceptionalism and all the other isms like racism and classism.
Propose to a middle-class person that shelter should be a human right, and they’ll point to the projects and say that their tax money provides. That system exists, therefore the system should work, no, must work, or what are the tax dollars for?
We’re so invested in capitalism that providing people with basic human needs is predicated on cost.
And on a completely different part of the thread:
I want one.
I cringe-watch the shows (the people are awful, but the designs are often good) for the same reason I red books on boatbuilding - we’re still hoping to fit up an RV for travel and filming, and clever spaces and unexpected built-ins will make our travels easier.
I fail to see how that is germane to my point. In many locales from a tax standpoint a “shelter” is most likely defined no differently than a tool shed. And as a result there are no codes or laws in place to define its taxation and usage. By building what is defined as a shelter on my plot of land it may mean I still pay property taxes on the land, but no taxes on the structure.
I am talking about the potential cost the resident of said structure, not what someone pays in taxes to support a social system.
Reuse means the resources needed to reclaim the steel are not used until potentially years later. In the meantime you are getting more value out of the material, not using new material to make a building, so on, and so forth. It isn’t always the case, but then again the (stupid) blanket statement that it’s better to use virgin material as long as the material is wood is even less supported. Also, the idea that tearing apart the old material, recasting it, turning it into structural parts transporting all of that several times, and building with it will be a priori less wasteful than reusing something that was already built would take some convincing.
Recycling is one of those activities which makes sense some of the time but not all. And pushing it to the front instead of encouraging reduction and reuse has a long and not-very-nice history.
Not always, but that’s the way to bet if you’re extending the life of something that would otherwise be thrown away and delaying having to produce virgin material. Even if we’re talking about recycling the container there are costs - transportation to the recycling facility, recylcing the material, transporting it to its new location, paying retail for the material that was already useful without being broken down, the work needed to turn raw construction materials into a new building, so on and so forth. If you want to talk about total costs you have to consider it from both sides, not just the one that supports your position. And even then most of the recylced material value in the shipping container will still be there years later.
I don’t have any beef with the folk wanting to make containers into homes, but they aren’t a solution that has ever appealed to me personally. I’m very tall, and plenty wide, so I like high ceilings and doors I can easily pass through. I don’t necessarily want all that much square footage, but I’d love to be able to afford a place with a bathtub I could fit in one day, and a nice kitchen. Until I can, it’s apartment life for me
Unfortunately the purchasing, inspection, and installation processes were turned into a mess. I almost went with that option and discovered how complicated it can be (and how many people now have buyer’s remorse):
Except there’s not enough capacity to recycle the steel that’s already in the stream.
Recycling SOUNDS great but only is economical for specific resources. Reuse is nearly always better than recycling, especially since we don’t recycle most things well at all.
And so on. Notably, the only common metals that are economical to recycle and ARE actually recycled are stainless steel, aluminum (and titanium for similar reasons), and ofc copper and gold. There really isn’t much carbon steel recycling capacity in the entire country.
Yes, recycling definitely helps the environment in some ways but currently, we do a rather piss-poor job of it. Anyone sneering at people who find a way to repurpose what would otherwise sit and rust is, frankly, an elitist idiot.
I’m not sneering at anyone. That seems a bit harsh based on my comment. I was just adding a bit of nuance to the argument, which you’ve countered. No need for personal attacks.
I think creative housing is cool.
Apologies, I meant that in a more general sense, directed at some of the more negative attitudes here, not specifically directed at YOU as sneering. My bad, I should have been clearer; I’ve edited my post, hopefully it parses better.
Shipping containers are a bit of a bust at being cheap and sturdy; but y’know what they are so good they’ve basically come to define modern logistics at? Being portable.
If you want to solve the homeless problem by housing the homeless they are a lousy starting point. If you want to ‘solve’ the homeless problem by putting a thin veneer of twee teeny house on the concept of containerizing a bunch of powerless and impoverished undesirables so that they can be resettled by truck, train, ship, or some combination of the above without inefficient repacking; and ultimately warehoused using the existing infrastructure adapted for stacking containers as high as their CSC plates advise on concrete pads in various out-of-the-way locations…Well…now you’ve got some potential.
Subscribing to the theory that containers are a good starting point for houses can be an innocent mistake; an interest in a ‘housing’ scheme that renders the homeless readily transported somewhere is considerably less mistaken; but also far less innocent.
Unfortunately, by the time a wooden boat is ready to haul out and be retired, they’re usually rotten, full of shipworms and iron sickness.
There’s a lovely series on Youtube by a an English chap rebuilding an Albert Strange designed yacht, called “Tally Ho”. He hasn’t been able to reuse anything other than a couple of stern timbers from the original.
And reduction is even better, which is why the plastic companies push the idea of recycling so hard. They want us to use more of their products and pretend it’s a good thing.
I like how designers think of shipping containers like Lego blocks and come up with pretty cool designs, except all those cantilevers require extra reinforcement. On paper it seems like a solution: we have all these building blocks, we just stack them up and make housing. Except in reality it’s not necessarily any cheaper or faster than building more standard designs from common materials.
This company makes shipping container homes, and while I’m not sure how cost effective their designs are compared to a standard modular home, I still think their most basic “escape pod” model is a cool idea because it’s pre-made and ready to go, with fixtures and everything-- just drop it on a foundation and connect to electricity/sewer.
