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Living In A Steel Box: Londoners Live In Shipping Containers Due To Soaring Rents
With even Bank of England head Mark Carney admitting UK housing prices may be a little bubbley (and affordability plumbing new depths), RT reports that a hostel in east London has come up with the ingenious idea, to try and solve homelessness amid soaring rents in the British capital, of converting a shipping container from China into a tiny low cost home for hard up and desperate Londoners. The boxes, called mYpads, cost GBP75 per week - around one-quarter of the rent of most distant yet commutable borough in London - and are affordable for even those on minimum wage.
Although it’s only a steel box, they are calling it mYpad, as notwithstanding how small it is, it’s a compact home with a tiny kitchen, bathroom and living quarters complete with a flat screen TV and a single bed.
Lying on your bed, you could almost imagine you were in a bunk on a ship, perhaps the one on which the containers were transported.
But as rents in London continue to soar, putting most flats and houses out of reach of many people on low incomes or benefits, these may be part of the solution.
A mYpad costs just £75 a week. While in some parts of the UK this is cheap but not a giveaway, in London it’s unheard of. In the British capital the average rent, even in a distant borough where oligarchs wouldn’t venture, alive or dead, is around £300 a week.
At 30% of the minimum wage, mYpad is affordable to those who need it most. Louise Stephenson used to live in a hostel but will be one of the first mYpad tenants.
“I think it’s difficult for anyone right now to get comfortable accommodation at a good price, without paying extortionate amounts of rent,” she told RT’s Sarah Firth.
MYpad is the brainchild of Timothy Pain and the YMCA Forest hostel in Walthhamstow East London. The containers get shipped to Tilbury from China and are then sent to a company for fitting out.
“Society takes the carpet out from under them, because the moment they get into work, they can’t afford to live in a hostel and they can’t afford to live anywhere else. It doesn’t make any moral or economic sense,” Pain told RT.
Each container costs £20,000 and to start with they will be built at just two sites in 2014, both of which are connected to the Forest Hostel and are only for young people the charity is working with.
But with some funding from the Greater London Authority, it is hoped that more charitable housing associations will take them on.
While there are plans to build thirty more mYpads next year, this is not even a drop in the ocean. Unless Britain increases the rate at which it is building affordable, new homes, then by 2020 there will be a shortfall of 2 million homes in the UK.
In London this means that some people may never be able to afford a home of their own.
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Nonetheless, these things make great beach houses, club houses and work shops.
Put um on a slow boat to China and see how well they do after that trip.
"In London this means that some people may never be able to afford a home of their own."
1) No outrageous property taxes paid to fund statist indoctrination at shitty schools
2) No HOA assholes
3) No mortgage
4) No mortgage default
5) No foreclosure
6) No shitty credit score
7) No weird neighbor for the next 20 years
8) No roof replacement
9) No HVAC replacement
10) No fix or repair daily
It's fun to stay at the
Y-M-C-A
C'mon admit it, you at least thought of making the letters with your arms like back in our ill spent youth.
"The boxes .. are affordable for even those on minimum wage."
this is *great* news!
now the minimum wage can be reduced.
and property taxes can be increased to recover the amounts needed to support the current high-level services we all demand
regulations will need to be revised, of course, to force these cheap boxes to be upgraded to the kind of dwellings that neighbors will proud of
Horri, bloody pads.
Black Mirror.
Let's get some MSAs on those puppies!
Never gets old, nor has it been as relevant in a long, long time:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
Let's get some MBSs on those puppies!
bloodclaat?
hahahha retards
in vietnam i can stay at the best party hostel in hanoi for a week, eat good food, drink, smoke and fuck fellow backpackers and still pay less than 75 pounds a week
this is pathetic
A little humor courtesy of the Daily Paul:
Gay Obama
http://bit.ly/1bH8Jh6
The Republican and Democratic internationalist leadership, along with their special interest parasites of crony capitalists, socialists and central bankers, promised so so much with "free trade" agreements. They opened up China, created NAFTA, CAFTA, ---, and now they seek to finalize the TTP in secret. It is clear that current leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties, especially at the very top, are more interested in the status quo direction which has ruined our economy and culture. Todays version of the leadership clique still aims to do an end run around our country and people and give enormous power and riches to the few- their buddies. They are disgusting and real flesh and blood traitors who seek protection from the masses with the emerging military/police/surveillance state. The people are the enemy and as far as they are concerned need be left in the dark, dumbed down, and left with false choices.
A perceptive guy who frequents ZH came up with this one some time ago. I use it often.
"It's a Criminal system, built by Criminals for Criminals. The business of America used to be business. Now the businesses of Amerika are war, theft, mass murder, and police state crackdown on anyone who objects."
So when america was being built on the back of slave labor, was that theft? What about these wars? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States
Please stop with the ancestor worship... they are the same all singing, all dancing crap of the earth as we are...
My forebearers were po' white trash precisly because of the cheap imported labor from africa.
THe more things change . . .
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews
Jewish Owned Slave Ships
"The following is a partial listing of ships that are recorded as having Jewish owners and are known to have transported slaves. This list, it must be emphasized, is indeed a partial list" (p. 138).
The list is too long to include here.
Jews and the Rape of Black Women
"Jews engaged in the widespread practice of the sexual exploitation of dependent [female] slaves. Such was the practice of jews since the Middle Ages - a practice which required religious legislation to abate. Slave women were employed primarily for domestic and agricultural service in the households of the jewish upper classes" (p. 141).
Checkmate, and my I add very astute observation as that perceptive "guy" who wrote that was none other than myself.
Imitation is the highest form of flattery so Thank you.
Miggy.
By the way,
My best description or term I continue to use to describe the Criminal (s) system is:
The Global Criminal Oligarch Cabal Bankster Intelligence Crime Syndicate. Long winded, I know. I believe it decribes the Globalist to a T.
news flash in the animal specie known as mankind, stronger, faster, smarter individuals lead the mass and stay at the top of the pyramid while enslaving everyone else who wish they could get up there too. It's a game called life, and the rules are simple; you struggle to survive daily against the competition and you can only dominate, submit, cooperate -when domination is impossible and mutual destruction is threatening, people "choose" to cooperate- or..flee. You can also refuse to play the game anymore and kill yourself tho.
Here is another front of the war on the american people by our gov't.
".....
One late night, I was going over my notes and discovered that there were four areas impacted by the Air Force in Arizona in terms of going after individual property rights. The four areas consisted of my area north of Surprise, parts of Tucson, Gila Bend and Yuma. Adjacent to my notes, was a news release telling Arizona how wonderful the CANAMEX Highway would be for travel and corporate profit when the construction was complete. I discovered at that moment that the four areas under fire from the Air Force identically matched the four planned CANAMEX routes into Arizona.
The CANAMEX is the transportation corridor of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). CAFTA represents a free trade agreement which has resulted in the loss of protective tariffs and the flight of manufacturing and jobs to foreign markets in search of cheap labor. Subsequently, another goal of the Air Force is to use its mission to drive out homeowners in the vicinity of a CANAMEX corridor in order to suppress property values. The land needed by the globalists for their highway is funded 50% by the state and local government and 50% by the Federal Highway Transportation Administration. Their goal is to make that land acquisition as cheap as possible. The Air Force’s mission, of ensuring the profitability of Lockheed Martin, is also being used to make land acquisition costs along these planned CANAMEX Highways as cheap as possible. I ran the odds of these four coincidences being due to mere luck (I used to teach statistics at the undergraduate level), and the odds were calculated at 65 million to one! There can be little doubt, that this is a conspiracy involving the bankers and the Air Force. By the way, who do you think is behind the CANAMEX and CAFTA? It is some of the same bankers that own the military industrial complex. These people are unquestionably brilliant.
I further discovered that CAFTA and NAFTA were about destroying American sovereignty through the creation of the over-arching Security, Prosperity Partnership (SPP). This is the North American Union. I learned very quickly that the stories being told by alternative media writers and talk show hosts about how a small group of men were attempting to control world finance and wanted to eventually create a world government, were indeed true!! I subsequently became engaged in this fight and have not looked back.
The CANAMEX and the NAFTA Superhighway will encompass 80 current highway corridors in America. The millions of Americans along these planned routes will have trouble with the military, not realizing the real goal is the expansion of the North American Union. These free trade agreements spell the death of America because of the loss of jobs and the continued influx of millions of unskilled workers into America which serves to break the backs of our infrastructure and is destroying the wages of the American middle class.".........
http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/12/10/the-air-force-is-preparing-to-steal-the-land-of-millions-of-americans/
Adjust your paranoia: the "world government" you fear is the US which is controlled by oligarchs.
The Global Criminal Oligarch Cabal Bankster Intelligence Crime Syndicate to be more exact.
I would live in one... errr I mean like 6-8 of them connected together.
It's more like put it on a fast tractor trailer after the beach party and before the Department of Environmental Resources shows up.
I know a guy who converted one of these into a repair shop/parts warehouse/ auxiliary living quarters for his yacht crew and then shipped both to Spain for the America's Cup. The boatyard guys he took with him were afraid they wouldn’t have a steady supply of Budweiser on foreign soil so a special rack/dispenser was constructed in the corner for 50 30-paks.
American women leading us out of this Great Recession.
You're in a containor now, you're not behind the crowd, you wont get rich by digging a ditch, cause you're IN the containor now.
It appears that link may no longer work, but here it is...
bitches can make anything nice <--jelous
I have the same water heater for a mobile emergency. The only thing saving this woman right now from being locked out of her home by the auhtorities and put in a shelter, is that it would be very bad PR for the regulators. But the fact is, her home is completely illegal and in violation of many codes and ordinances.
Yep. If you saw a well-off white guy do it, they would have to abide by all the regulations, which means that it would never happen.
I don't want to be overly cynical but something tells me we don't know the whole story. Someone gave her the container for free but who put up the wall studs, sheetrock and taping? She did all the construction work herself, ok. it's possible but very unlikely. Where's the baby daddy to her kids? Out working the land for food? You know she's on public assistance.
isnt she paying anything for the land she settled on? doesnt she work, doesnt she have to drive for hours to get to the city/town nearby?
Good luck defending yourself if some random weirdo finds out where you live all alone with your daughters.
Hipster bullshit as usual. Im sure she only lives there on the week ends and is suported by someone else who lives in the city and bought the land.
You'll be a hero of the neighborhood
Nobody knows that you left for good
You're in the army containor now
Oh, ooo oh you're in the army containor. Now
Shit, Steinbeck had characters living like this 100 years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8bYTnSK3cg
In Malibu, my choices were few.
1) An old schoolbus with all the seats ripped out on the edge of a cliff.
2) A rusty camper trailer.
3) A modified caboose.
I chose the camper trailer. An 8 x 10. Lived in it for 3 years. Manually flushed dookies with a couple pots and pans.
Best time of my life ever.
Ah the good ole days. I can only now affford to live like a hippie but now it's not safe because of the increase in crime. I also got beat out of the no-condom free-love days because then AIDS became prevalent. I tell ya, life is just not fair.
More than half of London's population is now non British. Any connection?
The largest English speaking city in the world where nobody speaks English.
Isn't that Miami?
More than a Trillion dollars leaves developing nations every year. Russia being the largest with almost 200 billion being smuggled out (can anyone say Mafia/Oligarchs). How much of it ends up in London real estate? probably a lot since the laws favor foreign ownership.
http://qz.com/156699/nearly-1-trillion-was-smuggled-out-of-developing-countries-in-2011/
And their bulletproof.
Not even close actually.
At least they are rat proof.
No. They can however, make a nice Faraday Cage. Keeping the NSA at bay.
You mean protecting against an EMP. It has no effect on the NSA.
I'm guessing a high roller can get a two story flat.
That would be "unfair."
Sorry Guys and Gals
This is old news.............been at least 3 times this has come arround in the last 25 years.
Nothing to see move along
hence this add http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZuJFgeCtNE
This is a much better story
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2381451/Slough-spy-plane-detects-6-000-illegal-beds-sheds-thermal-imaging.html
The govt going to incresing lengths to rip that tax money out of your arses.
God Bless those retired Brits here in Florida driving around in their convertible Corvettes while society decays all around them and the younger generation is fucked out of existence.
There are a few of these in Venice California , as Art , two blocks from the beach.
Decades ago, I had a friend who made his home in a rented storage unit. I guess he was ahead of his time.
ZeroHedge Town.
Where's Banzai ?
John Galt would be proud.
Carneyville
How do sheeple pay "increasing rents" with declining wages and declining purchasing power?
They can until they can't.
Section-8 housing vouchers
The movie called Blade Runner is looking pretty prophetic right now.
Yer, the light that burns twice is bright burns half as long
The second installment is on the way, but pushed to the back of the heap... I think Ridley has exodus (why they're going to follow up aronofsky's noah, who knows...), the forever war, and prometheus 2 on deck... but apparently harrison ford is signed up and the script is far along in development... so... we'll see.
Snow Crash
Neuromancer
The picture looks like an early version of the towers in Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One". (A quick, fun sci-fi quest novel, if you happen to like that sort of thing.)
The rent.... is too damn HIGH!
THIS is what we have come to.
Forget 2million homes in 2020, we all know there will be plenty of housing available when the finanicals burst and blood is on the streets. Central planning knows which is one of the reasons why they ain't building IMHO With all the boomer generation in housing and they out number the newbies (sorry, scrub that out, payer generation) there should be lots to go around, soon enough...
Will be? There already are! The shadow inventory, last I saw, was outrageously high. The banks are doing all that they can to keep deflation from happening. Domestic demand is in the toilet, the only players in the game are international money launderers...http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-11/las-vegas-housing-demand-has-cr...
The economy desperately needs deflation to "enema-ize" the the shit out of it and return some homeostasis. Of course, I'm preaching to the choir...
Welcome to biflation: what you make and what you own deflate (shrink). But don't expect to pay any less as costs inflate (grow).
The only thing left to do is to stop worrying and learn to love your oligarch
cost push inflation...
Looks like a pretty sweet pad!
Sheepdog's "Looks like a pretty sweet pad!" Quite a lol but then again ... not.
work the back forty for food and bunk bed. a civil war was fought over this concept...
Just put some bars across the front and you're good to go. /s
Maybe they can start instaling them in US cities. Create viliages with these. With less consumption and empty containers it's a solution.
In the US we call these folks "preppers".
Preppers would not choose to position their particular steel box in the middle of a fragile, first-to-go-when-the-SHTF, densely packed urban area, chock full of chip on shoulder "minorities".
Yes, rent a backhoe and go out to your plot in the woods, dig a big hole, stick the container in it and bury the bastard. But remember to use some bracing to the enterance, you can fortify that later. Insti-bunker!
SAD SAD SAD
A steel box > mortgage slavery to some douchebag banster rentier
However, the rise of rent for flats in London, SF, NYC, Boston, etc is purely comical because some of these places are REALLY shitty. At least the steel box is clean (if not cold).
How do sheeple pay "increasing rents" with declining wages and declining purchasing power?
The oligarchs want people to live in expensive hedge fund owned properties.
RE
Easy, just get another job!
You're working too many hours for too little pay because those before you hung a debt yoke around your neck before you were even born, and now you're doing the same thing to the next generation.
Suck it up, buttercup.
work is for suckers - just go on the dole - you can do pretty good on the dole these days
These oligarchs claim that they can do this because they already own the property. If you go out to West LA, Brentwood, Santa Monica (where seasoned college educated professionals in their one bedrooms are renting out their only bedroom and sleeping in their living rooms because they don't want to admit that they can't afford their rents)---the "for rent" signs for $2500/1 bedroom are up EVERYWHERE. Lots of apartments are vacant because whoever owns these properties don't want to work, they just want to milk one tenant for so much money. AFTER the subprime collapse.
If and when the Federal Reserve interest rates go up, we will find out who really owns these properties. :)
It's not unlike Californians to indebt themselves to appear richer than they really are.
I laugh when they act like they have the audacity to act like a prick because they decided to leverage their family's inheritance to suffice for their inferiority complex. (I've seen it on the other side. Funny when realtors try to pull one over on a finance professional who know what a balance sheet is. )
Business (ie. small businesses) is a fascade. Hedge funds are taking out teaser rate loans to hoard complexes to rent out one apartment at an excessive rate for an average place. Houses in the GHETTOS in California are actually better quality than they are in these "prime" areas. Don't underestimate minority credit limits either. And don't underestimate "colored" folk who actually DO take care of their properties.
I'm talking about the people you meet in church, not the kooks. You can figure out the difference. THe housing market can sort itself out nicely if it were allowed to happen. We just to need to prove the "status quo" "MSM" "PR" people wrong.
Mitt Romney is tearing down his old modest La Jolla home of about 3000 square feet to build a McMansion. the gentrification process is heading for SM too, where a lot of homes are old and small, the property is attractive and the 1% dont want to bother with SoCentral LA where you're in the flight path to LAX and there's a refinery between you and the ocean and frankly it will take a decade to do it all. meanwhile the poor are being shuffled to the upper desert lots of wide open spaces ( of courses the homes are only ten feet apart ) its the same old story
This looks like a variation on the Agenda21 microapartments being piloted in NYC.
. . . and when you kick the bucket you have a ready made coffin, win/win.
Just padlock the door and walk away. Or, for the nautically inclined, drill a few holes and drop it in the ocean. Viola, instant burial at sea!
Used to call those structures ' time shares ' in Spain.
dup
Used to call 'em "sweat boxes" in prisons in The South.
Didn't I see one of those in Bridge over the River Kwai?
Put 2 sets of railroad car wheels, run them down the railroad track, have yourself a job working on the railroad with your home in tow like they did back when I was a gandy dancer and would ride the rails to the next town for more work.
Don't need no stinkin' house when your work is always on the move and you're too young and dumb to know shit from tar. Now, I'm too old and much too dumb, haven't learned a thing all my born days.
The only thing new about the container digs is the wheels were removed. Helluva lot stronger than a 'manufactured home' and not a bad idea to recycle it whole.
I knew people who worked their entire lives riding the rails in a bunk car and were married. Never owned a home. He worked and she followed with him to the work. After they retired and were too old to buy a house, they rented an apartment. Kind of a nomad's way of life but they did it.
Container living is nothing new, just hit a new mode.
#Bankerswinning
AGENDA 21!!! bitches!!
in spite of my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.....
is that from Look Back in Anger?
Re-purposed containers have been around for years, and there are many companies that offer conversion kits. This isn't "news".
Put two of them together, and you have a space about 38 ft long, 8 ft high and 8 feet wide. Let's you stuff a small bath and laundry at one end, a bedroom at the other, and have a decent sized living/dining/kitchen area.
75 UK pounds is over $100 per week. Even that is not affordable for minimum wage workers unless they pack in there like sardines.
Minimum wage is 2x higher in UK than US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country
One big advantage to using containers to house the poor is that once the gov. decides to gentrify the neighborhood, you can economically ship the low wage renters to the boonies. No more poor people, and no eviction pile of broken furniture roadside.
Neat idea, but I hear from January 2014 Romania and Bulgaria are going to ship containers fully occupied
They could at least use a 40 foot container....
20000 pounds to convert a steel container to a trailer without wheels? That's $32804.
The sad thing is, they will wake up one morning and find themselves on a ship headed back to China.
CHina has a job surplus. IT may not be a bad thing.
If you like your cardboard refrigerator box, you can keep your cardboard refrigerator box.
Metaphor becomes Reality ... well, with the price of Ticky Tacky these days, what else can you expect?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM8JhvfoqdA
Malvina Reynolds - Little Boxes
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
Did anyone else notice the ad on this page for making a garage for you new shipping container home?
http://www.steelmasterusa.com/industrial/products/container-covers?gclid=CMDJlf2Gq7sCFYlAMgod_18AfQ
Unbelieveable. Next, how to domesticate a rat for a small sized pet for that party bungalow.
The slow motion pauperization(begun in the early '70s) of the West's working class and, yes, the middle class, is just becoming more open and visible. This is nothing new in other parts of the world. I worked in Tokyo in 1980. Tokyo working class then lived in the same conditions as represented by these containers, only with 1/2 the sg footage, and the facilities down the hall.
These container homes have the added advantage of being stackable.
You really can live on the 10th floor for £75 pw ;-)
too bad WTC wasn't made out of these things, they would have never knocked it down.
20k Pounds????? Jesus the YMCA is getting ripped off. Go check out Alibaba and see what you can buy for that kind of cash. You can buy a 1700 sq ft prefab steel structure home for that kind of money, complete with interior walls, roof, siding, windows, and doors. You need to add electrical and plumbing, but that stuff is cheap as well.
You can buy a complete prefab shipping container home for $5000. Hell in the United States you can buy a fifth wheel trailer fully furnished with a single slide out for $25k.
I've been thinking about buying land and buying up a whole bunch of Chinese pre fab homes. In some areas of the country where a dilapidated 1950s Sears home goes for $325k, buying a lot for $50k and putting up a Chinese kit home could net you $150k in profit easily.
Neal Stephenson calls another one (Snow Crash, 1994).
compared top the car I lived in as a yute, these things are palaces.
Is it a coincidence that two of the ads I see on this page are "Do you need to find a way to make more money in your retirement" and one for shipping containers? Hmmmmm
some of those old cars from the 50's were bigger than most shipping containers, with fins and chrome, they were a far superior unit
Ok what have we got? Lots of spare shipping containers sir, and lots of spare people.
put a half dozen of these together, and bury half of another and you have a McShipping Container with a pool
If I keep my head down and my nose clean I can escape cardboard city for tin pan alley, shucks.
yeah but think of the money you save on fire insurance
Or freeze to death! Toss of a coin.
Slightly off topic, how stupid are those Ukrainians? If they had waited another week there would be no need to build sand (snow) banks. It will be -30 and 12ft of snow.
200 of them die annually of frostbite/ hypothermia and if the Russians turn off the gas. . . they will be praying for an atomic strike. just saying
I'am living in a box...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sq8VDXlWQk
I found a way to break through the cellophane...cuz I know what's goin' on!
Hotel 12 Monkeys. Stack em up.
Couple of points:
1. Wasn't stuff like that seen in Japan in the late 1980's, when the site value of the Emperor's palace exceeded the _total_ value of _all_ real estate in CA, and (somehow) there were multi-generational mortgages? That situation did not end well;
2. No-one in the UK real estate wants to talk about it, but outside city centres there is _plenty_ of land available for development (so no serious supply problems). However, there is a 'green-belt' policy which makes that land unavailable. Remove that policy and within five years you will have plenty of new houses (and plenty of construction jobs), and quite possibly a sharp reduction in the price of average homes. Of course, not going to happen with a government/central bank that until very recently thought 95% mortgages were a good idea, and where every last voter is borrowed to the hilt against real estate assets.
and in the U.S. we'll call them McPartments
and in the U.S. we'll call them McPartments
stack em & pack em -- Agenda 21
Hardly the "latest innovation" in affordable housing. Amsterdam University led the way with the Student Housing project initiated by Tempohousing - the Keetwonen Project http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen.html which started "construction" in 2005. The idea has caught on "Down Under" too - e.g. the Australian National University accommodation project started in 2009 - http://news.anu.edu.au/2009/10/21/shipping-container-accommodation-open/, and many other similar programmes.
Just because it (or they) used to be a shipping container, doesn't mean that, with a little imagination, the end result must be utilitarian - for instance - http://www.buzzfeed.com/kristinchirico/surprisingly-gorgeous-homes-made-from-shipping-containers. Far more interesting housing than the usual mass-designed, mass-produced "cookie-cutter" so-called "modern" housing, and every one of these properties would make an excellent home, particularly that Chilean hillside structure!!
Royal Wolf Shipping (Melbourne) even has their Office made from recycled shipping containers - http://room11.com.au/projects/royal-wolf-melbourne-hq/
There are LOTS of similar programmed going on Worldwide, for example -
http://room11.com.au/projects/royal-wolf-melbourne-hq/
http://1800recycling.com/2010/07/recycled-shipping-container-buildings/#.Uqok71-4Z9A
http://inhabitat.com/houston-hive-is-a-sustainable-village-made-from-500-shipping-containers/
so the Brits had been drawing immigrants for decades giving them cheap subsidized homes, and now they run of homes for themselves.
perhaps this QE-driven policy is intended to drive immigrants out?