Shipping Containers to Become Condos in Detroit | Hacker News Reader

Shipping Containers to Become Condos in Detroit

news.yahoo.com

19 pointsspking23 comments

"The first U.S. multi-family condo built of used shipping containers is slated to break ground in Detroit early next year."

There are good reasons nobody has done this before.

Among them is that despite more than a decade of attempts to to create such projects, shipping containers remain grossly ill-suited for conversion to dwellings. Their dimensions are poor for commodious habitation; they remain uninsulated, unfenestrated, and expensive to modify due to unibody construction; and in relatively short supply for the purpose.

It makes little more sense than cutting teddy bears lengthwise to make carpet slippers.

Maybe not for multi-family condos, but the Dutch seem to have a great time with their shipping containers. This student housing complex is quite popular:

http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen.html

Granted, affordable housing is in short supply in the Netherlands, while there's plenty of shipping containers considering that Rotterdam is the biggest port in Europe.

When someone drops something on the floor in one of these, everyone else in every other room will hear it like it's being dropped next to them.

The Australian National University was having problems with the supply of student accommodation, so they built a couple of wings with over 100 shipping container-based modular units:

http://accom.anu.edu.au/UAS/43.html

It seems to be working a little better than the teddy-bear carpet slippers you suggest.

It's gonna roast its inhabitants during the summer and then freeze them in the winder.

> It makes little more sense than cutting teddy bears lengthwise to make carpet slippers.

You. Kickstarter. Go!

It is quite simple to install windows in unibody construction. I did it on my Macbook Air.

Really, this is a fashion thing, like all-concrete condos.

Why would this be built in Detroit of all places? Isn't the whole point of shipping container housing that it's cheaper and quicker to build? Detroit already has a large amount of extremely cheap housing all around it, with people leaving the city every day. There's no housing shortage.

Two reasons:

One believe it or not there's a housing shortage in the downtown area. A lot of employers are giving employees bonuses to live downtown and young professionals are taking them.

http://citiwire.net/columns/housing-shortages-in-detroit/

Second is that there's more freedom to experiment in Detroit than a lot of other places.

> Isn't the whole point of shipping container housing that it's cheaper and quicker to build?

Actually I think the whole point is "we have a shitload of shipping containers that we're never going to send back and we have no idea what to do with them".

In absolute terms, Detroit has lots of housing. But very specific types of housing is in very short supply. My sister lives there and "hipster" housing is in very short supply which is who I expect will live in these.

Hipsters do need an awfully specific habitat to thrive. Streets can't be too clean, air can't either, just enough poverty, but not too much actual poverty, a certain background level of tee-hee crime like smoking, lots of viable Starbucks (for income), lots of non-viable non-Starbucks (for "real" coffee), vegan sandwich shops, obsolete forms of commerce selling obsolete goods (like brick-and-mortar record- and book-stores), reasonable public transport, no actual manufacturing for a hundred miles, urban density, good place to walk around, the geography can't be boring, maybe an art gallery to complain about...

Actually, yeah. The thermostat for gentrification is pretty finicky.

If the art scene goes well in an area, retail and restaurants will follow. Two decades later, the area is expensive and boring.

Hypothesis: Hipsters are the yeast of gentrification.

Having been inside cargo containers they are not nearly as 'cosy' as one might hope, and if you finish off the inside with interior walls it cuts into the space. If you have never visited or stayed in a 'mobile home' (US term for pre-manufactured house) the 'boxness' is impossible to hide even at that scale. So while I think its a clever concept living there long term will be challenging I expect. Now as a hotel? A quick place to spend the night on the way to somewhere else? No problem.

Trailer homes are far better suited for habitation than shipping containers because they are designed and built for the purpose. To put it another way, shipping containers are burdened with too much technical debt.

Agreed. The two are basically the same thing except one was modified to be residential while the other was modified to be industrial. It makes little sense to try to convert the final product into another final product when prefabbing mobile homes is going to be much cheaper and easier to get up to code.

Well one of the issues here is 'container waste' which is to say a container which is no longer seaworthy. It is not unusual to be able to go down to any reasonably active port, and 'buy' (you think of it as buying, they think of it as disposing) a container. A few folks I know have done this and then had it dropped off on their property as a quick and dirty storage shed. (They seem to be about $2k each on ebay but I know of at least one that was purchased at the port of Oakland for $500 cash.)

I've heard that these containers are full of toxic chemicals used for pest control (also to prevent spreading foreign species of plants and animals).

Hopefully it is possible to get all that nasty stuff out before converting them to housing? Maybe a bit of sandblasting does the trick, but still, not my first choice for a home...

Possible, but unlikely to be done.

"We washed them thoroughly with a hose."

Has Detroit reached third world status yet?

Anyone who's been in the military recently has spent quite a bit of time packing and repacking a shipping container, or just hanging out inside one during poor weather. I note that the Amsterdam student housing has an internal cross section of 225cm square (a little over 7').

They're certainly better than a tent, and I'd happily sleep in one if the alternative was homelessness or some unsafe shanty town, but they seem such a poor solution if your goal actually has anything to do with reuse or inexpensive housing (as opposed to trendy conspicuous environmentalism).

Although containers can be bought for as little as $2,500, they shouldn't be seen as a low-cost housing solution.

"Ninety-five percent of the cost still remains..."

-- The Catch.

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