December 4, 2012

Shipping Containers and Dormitories for Grown-ups

Occasionally items just accumulate – until you realize you have a meme:

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From the Vancouver Sun:

In the first project of its kind in Canada, 12 recycled shipping containers will become social housing for women in the Downtown Eastside by next spring. …Container homes

Six of the 12 units will be set aside for women over the age of 55 living in the Downtown Eastside, who will pay about $375 per month in rent, said Atira executive director Janice Abbott. “It’ll be amazing. They’ll get brand-new, innovative, self-contained units,” she said.
 

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The push-button house:

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Action at 10:18.

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From Alan Durning at the Sightline Institute: 
 

Emancipating the Rooming House

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They may not be for you, but rooming houses and other small, basic dwellings should not be against the law. Some people want them — need them, in fact — and they provide housing affordably, with a tiny ecological footprint, and in walkable neighborhoods. Yet across most of the metropolitan Northwest, these basic homes are currently forbidden or rendered unprofitable by local codes.

My last article recounted how we arrived at this confounding pass, where the law has vacated the lower rungs of the historic housing ladder. This article describes nascent efforts to repopulate those rungs, by building neo-rooming houses and micro-apartments — by building dwellings that may be much simpler than middle-class tastes but nonetheless offer everyone, even those with pinched budgets, what Ernest Hemingway called “a clean, well-lighted place.”

Essay here.

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Comments

  1. It’s nothing more than a gimmick. Hip because its different. Containers as homes have a lifespan of 10-12 years, and stacks have to be dismantled and residents displaced. Utterly unsustainable. Similar to welding together a half-dozen SUVs.

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