The Housing Recovery: From REO-To-Rent To Containers-To-Condos

With REO-to-Rent now yesterday's trade, the Baltic Dry Index stumbling along near its lows (along with a glut of containers), and a 'recovery' in US housing, what better than to leverage all of these themes; to wit, as ABC News reports [11], the first U.S. multi-family condo built of used shipping containers is slated to break ground in Detroit early next year. So forget Trailer Parks, now the increasingly mothballed ports of America will be wonderful waterfront property courtesy of your very own (slightly used) cargo container. One proponent of this 'cargotecture' [12] warns that although containers can be bought for as little as $2,500, they should not be thought of as a low-cost housing solution. Tempted? We are sure; below are several current developments.

[13]

Here’s a few recent North American projects – including the new condo complex  – where the shipping container takes center stage:

Exceptional Green Living on Rosa Parks, Detroit: Container to Condo

Image Credit: Three Squared Inc.

This 20-unit, four-story condo complex consisting of 93 stacked cargo containers — the first U.S. multi-family residence  to be built from these discarded vessels — has been in the works for four years.  Tabled when the national real estate market shattered, the project is now scheduled to break ground early next year  in midtown Detroit. The units will come rigged with ductless heating and air systems, tankless water heaters and other energy-saving systems. “We’re putting money into these energy efficiencies so that the tenant has reduced energy costs,” says Leslie Horn, CEO of Three Squared, the project’s developer.  “And we can build in less than half the time.”

The Sunset Cargotecture House, Seattle: Home Sweet Container

Built and designed by HyBrid Architecture as the Sunset magazine Idea House 2011, this 192-square-foot solar-powered  backyard container cottage is not even half the size of a New York City studio apartment.

Still, it manages to pack in a galley kitchen and micro bathroom with a ceiling-mounted showerhead – the floor’s redwood slats hide a drain  –  and can sleep up to four  (a bed unfolds from the wall, a couch converts, another bed can be added). But given the close quarters, it’s probably best if everyone’s related.

 Cinco Camp, Brewster County, Texas:  Light on the Land

Minimalism was the goal here. “It was more about the arrangement of the boxes. Most architects see those containers, and they want to manipulate them too much and cut them all up,” says Mark Wellen, who designed Cinco Camp for Roger Black, a former Rolling Stone and  New York Times art director  [14]who’d grown sick of the Hamptons.

Stripped of their paint and topped with large roof canopies for shade, each  box sits off the ground on short stilts. “There’s rattlesnakes, scorpions, spiders, all kinds of bugs,” says Wellen. “We made a conscious effort to get it off the ground.”

Weirdly enough, a major east-west railroad runs through this middle-of-nowhere terrain three to five times a day, its long, distant cars loaded with shipping containers, a regular reminder from where this home came.

The Box Office, Providence, R.I.: Lego Land

“The building is made of 140 tons of recycled steel, but it’s very difficult for a green building to have an identity,” says Peter Case, who developed and helped design the Box Office.  ”The bright paint, the solar panels on top get the message across that this is a green building.”

Case abandoned plans for a conventional office complex when the economy faltered and instead bought 35  shipping containers. But, he says, with construction costs at $1.6 million, the containers didn’t really save him money.

“A shipping container doesn’t want to be a building,” Case explains. “So you have to do quite a bit of gymnastics that cost money.” But the Box Office  is four times more energy efficient than a typical office building, and that’s where Case says he’ll see savings.  ”There’s no way for air to come in or out of a shipping container,” he says, “unless you want it to.”

Muvbox, Montreal: Take a Break in a Crate

The brainchild of Daniel Noiseaux, the design-obsessed restaurateur who brought wood-oven pizza to Montreal 31 years ago, Muvbox was inspired by the horse-drawn snack carts  and old-style canteens of centuries past, and Adam Kalkin’s  Push Button House  [15] installation of 2006.

While Montreal was first, Muvboxes have since surfaced in Paris, Toronto and New York’s Times Square, where the lobster frescoes yield to black-and-white stripes, and the menu changes from lobster to hot dogs and bagels. A movable feast indeed.

DeKalb Market, Brooklyn, N.Y.: A Portable Souk

As he drove  down the interstate in Oregon, where Lance had moved and had his eco-conscience raised,  he noticed “giant yards … with hundreds, possibly thousands” of shipping containers stacked up and suddenly saw his next restaurant. He bought one of these cargo holders, for about $3,000.

“It was the culmination of sustainability and recycling  and portability all coming together,” Lance says. And then there’s the romance of it: “This shipping container has traveled all over the world,” says Lance. “It’s shipped tons of who knows what, and for me it’s kind of intriguing that it gets to have a second life.”

Turning the retired cargo vessel into a taqueria wasn’t that hard, says Lance. Cutting out windows, spraying in the foam insulation, “anybody with a little construction background can probably figure those things out,” he says.

But getting the permits, the blueprints, the structural engineering reports through the state of Oregon took four years, and added “a ton” to the cost, Lance says.  ”What kept me going was if I could build one of these things and it works well, I could just copy the blueprints and  build 100 of them,” or pick up and move.

The Shipping Container House, Nederland, Colo.: Still ‘Cargotecture’