For those who haven’t spotted it, The Tyee and Monte Paulsen have an interesting series starting on affordable housing. The series looks at how shipping containers, which are ubiquitous around the world, can be used for housing.
I admire them for taking on this topic. And I’ve seen shipping containers used ingeniously in a few places I’ve visited. It seems to me I saw stores operating out of them in Kabul and, at the other end of the universe in all ways, I also visited an organic farm in Maui where the owners had turned a shipping container into their office. (They’d also turned a garden hose into an outdoor shower for our benefit, but that’s another story.)
The appeal of shipping containers for housing is obvious when you think about it practically. They’re designed to withstand the rigours of international transport — stacked dozens high on cargo ships, exposed to salt spray and extreme weather, loaded and unloaded by massive cranes. That structural integrity translates well to housing needs. A standard 40-foot container provides about 320 square feet of living space, roughly equivalent to a bachelor apartment, and can be modified with windows, doors, insulation, and plumbing relatively easily.
From an economic standpoint, the math is compelling. Used shipping containers can be purchased for anywhere from $3,000 to $8,000, depending on condition and location. Even with modifications for residential use — cutting openings, adding insulation, installing electrical and plumbing systems — the total cost often comes in well under traditional construction methods. In places like Amsterdam, London, and several U.S. cities, container housing projects have demonstrated that you can create livable units for a fraction of conventional housing costs.
The environmental argument is equally strong. Millions of shipping containers sit unused in ports around the world, particularly in North America, where import-heavy trade patterns mean containers accumulate faster than they can be shipped back. Repurposing these steel boxes for housing addresses two problems simultaneously: the need for affordable housing and the challenge of what to do with surplus containers that would otherwise be scrapped or left to rust.
However, I have to say that in the way of the great Media Chicken Shunning that is going on in this city, I currently am having strong doubts about whether Vancouver can accept any idea that strays outside the parameters of the mediocre and middle of the road that seems to prevail here. I’ve always known the city was parochial and small-minded, but that’s been brought home forcefully in the last couple of weeks, as all the pundits of the land have thundered on about the way global disaster will come to Vancouver if it allows urban chickens.
The container housing debate would likely trigger the same reflexive resistance that seems to greet any innovation in this city. I can already imagine the objections: concerns about “industrial” aesthetics ruining neighbourhood character, fears about property values, worries about building code compliance, and the inevitable hand-wringing about setting dangerous precedents. The same voices that see urban chickens as harbingers of urban decay would probably view container housing as a slippery slope toward shanty towns.
This resistance to change is particularly frustrating given Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis, which was already becoming apparent in 2010 and has only worsened since. While other cities experiment with innovative approaches to providing affordable housing, Vancouver tends to stick with conventional solutions that consistently prove inadequate to the scale of the problem. The bureaucratic and regulatory frameworks are designed around traditional construction methods, making it difficult for alternative approaches to gain traction even when they make economic and environmental sense.
I’m frankly completely baffled by this reaction. I could understand their scorn if the Vision council had decided to make decisions by consulting a ouija board or if it had mandated that all new housing development include a space for housing pigs and donkeys at the basement level, in order to promote food security.
But we’re talking about allowing urban chickens — a trend that has been growing in North America for at least the last decade. If anyone wanted to do even the most minimal research, they would see that hundreds of cities have made the move to allowing people to keep small numbers of chickens and that it’s hardly a radical concept. Susan Orlean in the New Yorker wrote about what a trend it is, definitive proof that, far from being some new age weirdo fad, it’s a yuppie as a Starbucks non-fat, no-whip moccachino.
The irony is that container housing, like urban chickens, is hardly a fringe concept anymore. Major architectural firms are designing sophisticated container-based developments, and cities from Amsterdam to Austin are incorporating them into their affordable housing strategies. What Vancouver sees as radical experimentation, other places treat as pragmatic problem-solving.
So … shipping containers as housing? Nice try, but I can well imagine what the great minds around here would have to say. No doubt we’ll stick to building the same expensive, conventional housing that most people can’t afford, while continuing to wonder why we have an affordability crisis.
