
Bay Area Living in Shipping Containers - gwallens
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-30/wharton-grad-s-got-a-tiny-illegal-solution-to-bay-area-housing
======
bahro
_In Los Altos, Brandon Williams crams 14 tenants into a four-bedroom, two-
bathroom house -- where monthly rates for a bed start at $1,000. He leases the
bungalow from a Chinese venture capitalist for about $6,800, which he can more
than double when all the beds are occupied.

“This is scalable,” said Williams, 28, a freelance electrical engineer. “I
know a guy who has about 12 of these.”_

What a scumbag.

~~~
superuser2
I live in one of these in San Francisco, and honestly I love it. For $1700/mo
I can live in a nice residential neighborhood with a <10 minute commute.
There's a full kitchen and a very spacious common area with couches, tables, a
TV, and plenty of power. I sleep in one of the eight bunks in the master
bedroom, right next to a balcony with a beautiful view of the skyline. Most of
us are interns and temp contractors, with an occasional "adult" passing
through while looking for permanent housing. Honestly, it's a lot nicer than
my University housing and not much more expensive.

Without it, I'd have to either live somewhere where I fear for my safety, add
1-2 hours of BART commute onto my workday (and lose easy access to SF
restaurants/culture), or spend $2500-$4000 for a studio in a comparable
neighborhood.

~~~
ghaff
I'm not contradicting you, but $1700/mo for an incredibly overcrowded dorm
room? Undergrad, doubles converted to triples were considered overcrowded.
Wow. Maybe that's the norm in SF these days but it's not something I would
have ever considered post-school.

~~~
superuser2
The master bedroom is huge; a king-size bed would have taken less than 30% of
the floor. There are two walk-in closets and a private bath.

Downstairs, there are 2 bedrooms that could have easily held 2 twin beds each,
and another small room that could have taken 1 twin bed.

As a single-family home it would have comfortably slept 7. It's probably 2-3x
larger than my childhood home and would have fetched $750,000+ in the suburban
Midwest.

Convert all those twins to bunk beds (as my landlord did) and you've got 10
people across the downstairs bedrooms. Replace the king-size bed with 2 bunk
beds, you've got 4 beds in the space where 1 was. 14 people sleeping in the
same amount of floor space that 7 previously occupied. Now take the vast empty
floor space in the master bedroom and add 2 bunk beds, and you're at the 18
that I live with.

It doesn't feel crowded. It has the same drawbacks that any room-sharing
situation has - you're never alone, you have to hear people breathe and snore
and shift around in bed, there's no possibility of having sex (you can sexile
one person - not 7), you have to smell people's smells. But it's no worse than
living in a double in college, summer camp, etc. I had no chance of bringing a
girl home anyway, the sounds are drowned out by the city/wind when you've got
a window open, and everyone is polite and sensitive to the fact that we're
sharing space.

A portion of that price also goes to Airbnb, which gives me trust/reputation,
escrow, precisely the dates of stay I wanted, and no monthslong Craigslist
game as is usually necessary to sublet in SF.

~~~
ghaff
Oh I understand it may be preferable to the alternatives. I just find paying
that kind of money to effectively live in a hostel as a working professional
to be pretty mind blowing. I'm glad I was never personally in that sort of
situation.

------
mrgoldenbrown
In crowded markets, the materials cost is rarely significant compared to the
real estate it sits on - living in a tent is still prohibitively expensive if
you have to lease the square footage it is pitched on. This article is more
about breaking zoning laws to save money than it is about shipping containers
vs traditional construction.

~~~
ethbro
_> living in a tent is still prohibitively expensive if you have to lease the
square footage it is pitched on_

The difference is tents aren't designed to be stackable.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=shipping+container+stacks&tb...](https://www.google.com/search?q=shipping+container+stacks&tbm=isch)

But as below comments mention, generally steel intermodal containers make
pretty poor livable areas for a variety of reasons. Lack of insulation, hard
surfaces, contamination from previous contents, weight and difficulty in
handling without heavy machinery, lack of local sourcability, etc. etc.

Your ideal use case is probably a port area with extremely high population
density and an advanced economy (for heavy machinery) but an extremely high
wealth disparity, in a reasonable climate. So, maybe SE Asian port cities?
With a sacrificial layer of containers on the outside to heat-sink?

------
TY
This stuff is straight out of "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. What's next?
Facebook powered Metaverse and bikers with sovereign status because they pack
personal nuclear weapons?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash)

~~~
toomuchtodo
I accept this future as long as rat things (robotic, nuclear powered creatures
matching the form of a canine) become a thing.

"As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed
never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much
of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy."

~~~
aiiane
Jack the barrier. Bring the noise.

------
advertising
Have seen numerous shipping container housing projects over the years and none
of them really took off. To make containers truly livable long term (combining
multiple containers, decent finishes, buildout etc) it seems to cross a price
threshold where a person who can afford to do it would likely build a
traditional dwelling.

This is more about creative subdividing to me. Whether it's a tent or a
shipping container.

~~~
roymurdock
In Ghana they are used extensively as shops/storefronts, but no one lives in
shipping containers. Even in the most rural areas, people make houses
literally brick by brick (buying 1-2 bricks at a time) instead of using
shipping containers for housing. I think it's for the reason you suggest, and
for the additional reason that I imagine living in a shipping container to be
somewhat akin to living in a big metal dumpster.

~~~
neilk
Why would anyone buy bricks in such small numbers, instead of saving up? A
wall with two extra bricks on it isn't more useful.

Is it just impossible to save money safely?

~~~
goodJobWalrus
In this [1] excellent book, it is said that they do it as form of saving.
Basically, they don't have bank accounts, and they know that if they don't buy
those 1-2 bricks right away after they get paid, they'll spend the money on
something else.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-
Pove...](http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-
Poverty/dp/1610390938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438279525&sr=8-1&keywords=poverty+economics)

~~~
roymurdock
This is a large part of the reason. Money that gets earned gets spent pretty
quickly on one thing or another, and it would be next to impossible for a
family to save up enough to buy all the materials to build a house in one go.

Another reason is that they don't have easy access to credit markets, so they
can't just get a mortgage and move into a home and start paying it off.

One more part of the reason is that they usually build the homes themselves,
and its rewarding to see the house go up brick by brick - visual progress is
being made.

I'm not an expert, but these are my informed observations and learnings.

------
zzalpha
It's a bit amusing to me that a concept originally envisioned to help provide
housing for the destitute is now being pitched as tech worker housing in the
bay area...

------
DonHopkins
"Cargotecture" is not uncommon in the Netherlands:

Shipping Container Houses, Amsterdam Noord

[http://greetingsfromholland.blogspot.nl/2010/08/shipping-
con...](http://greetingsfromholland.blogspot.nl/2010/08/shipping-container-
houses-amsterdam.html)

Keetwonen (Amsterdam student housing)

[http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen.html](http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen.html)

Amsterdam's Shipping Container Homes Are Lean And Green

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/08/amsterdam-
shipping-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/08/amsterdam-shipping-
container-homes_n_1582216.html)

Shipping Container Architecture

[http://blog.designpublic.com/2008/10/27/shipping-
container-a...](http://blog.designpublic.com/2008/10/27/shipping-container-
architecture/)

The Dutch have a thing for recycled architecture. You can see the colorful
student shipping container housing off in the distance from the bungee jumping
platform at the top of the luxurious Faralda Crane Hotel at NDSM ship wharf,
at around 10:00:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=860OXQjf87w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=860OXQjf87w)

They even made the KamerMaker, a 3D house printer, in a shipping container:

[http://www.threefarm.com/http/threefarmtumblrcom/2014/3/18/t...](http://www.threefarm.com/http/threefarmtumblrcom/2014/3/18/the-
first-3d-printed-house-is-under-construction)

------
infecto
This is a terrible idea. The problem is not finding cheap building materials
but optimizing land use.

I look around the bay area and I see a ton of single family homes. Where are
the large multi-story apartment buildings?

~~~
mahyarm
Being beaten down by a multitude of NIMBY forces, powered by perverse
incentives.

~~~
assholesRppl2
yeah, perverse incentives like preserving natural beauty and avoiding
untenable population density

edit: but if you build larger living spaces in places that nobody wants to
live, i'm happy with that

~~~
IndianAstronaut
Building up is a perfect balance between preserving beauty and nature and
price.

The reality is that the real blight on nature is the single family homes which
are built on forests and farmland.

------
j_baker
Honestly, I think these people are dicks: [http://kalw.org/post/how-tiny-
shipping-container-community-c...](http://kalw.org/post/how-tiny-shipping-
container-community-causing-big-fuss-oakland)

Not only is this an issue of residential codes. The other problem is that
they're doing manufacturing in a residential neighborhood that's not zoned for
manufacturing. And it's disturbing the neighbors in the area with noise and
even sewage spillover.

~~~
comrh
They sound so ridiculously tone deaf like the idea of having people move into
your neighbor and build houses from the ground up, unregulated, out of
shipping containers shouldn't bother anyone in the slightest.

------
mschuster91
Problem with shipping containers is that they should be decontaminated and
sanded down prior to living use - the contents get gassed, leak out dangerous
stuff and old insulation materials may prove dangerous, same for the paint.

~~~
mapmap
Good point. Also, I can't imagine it's safe to be running that camp stove in
an enclosed space either.

~~~
illegalsmile
It never is. That's why all camp stoves come with a warning not to cook in
enclosed spaces. Just a few weeks ago I was out camping and a father/son duo
died in their tent because it was raining out and they wanted to use the stove
to warm up food.

------
t0mk
Cheap housing for Docker interns

------
w1ntermute
High rent in the Bay Area is primarily due to poor land use. Not only are most
buildings very short, but there's a ton of unused land near 280. It doesn't
make sense to solve a political issue with technology.

~~~
optimusclimb
Ummm if by "unused land" you mean open space preserves, parks, amazing redwood
groves, etc...then yes, there is "unused land."

Building out on those areas because there's currently demand over on that side
of the Bay (because it's closer to Stanford and Sandhill road) would be a big
time shame.

~~~
setpatchaddress
I thought the Stanford/Sandhill area surrounding 280 was undeveloped because
the land is owned by Stanford. Not so?

------
presty
some more info:

[http://www.boxouse.com/](http://www.boxouse.com/)

Luke is YC

Here's a 28min video of him and Heather showing off the project back in
October
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfqunEuw61k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfqunEuw61k)

heard about this a few months ago and I find it pretty cool. if only the laws
were more favourable...

------
the-dude
Student housing Groningen, for years already:
[http://www.studenten.net/lifestyle/lifestyle/16842/wonen_in_...](http://www.studenten.net/lifestyle/lifestyle/16842/wonen_in_een_container_helemaal_zo_gek_nog_niet)
( Dutch with pictures )

------
russell_h
Neat project, but actual construction costs aren't what are driving bay area
housing prices.

Edit: and looking at their website
([http://www.boxouse.com/](http://www.boxouse.com/)), solving bay area housing
doesn't seem to be the actual business proposition.

~~~
gtirloni
So much BS in that website it's tough to read past the initial paragraphs.

------
prewett
Wow, so the response to squatters illegally living in a office building that
is zoned non-residential is "you should figure out a way to make the office
building legal to live in"?!

Either Ivy Lee's comments reflect a serious, willful, inability to see reality
and enforce the laws, or it is simply a poorly thought through excuse for a
willful choice to not enforce the laws. It reflects a deep dysfunction either
way. A few precedents like that would make me very, very hesitant to purchase
commercial property in San Francisco.

~~~
mahyarm
SF has been like this for decades. There is a reason why the entire bay area
has this anti-development problem.

------
jefurii
In one of William Gibson's Bridge Trilogy novels one of the main characters
lives in a shipping container in Southern California. It has come to pass.

------
CyberDildonics
Just build tall buildings. If Taipei and Hong Kong can do it, so can SF.

------
Shivetya
Reminds me of JG Ballard's Billenium where an overcrowded world has people
living in three point five square meter rooms that were subdivided out of any
space possible. Basically a world where to get more space you had to get
married and marriage required three children, all furthering the population
density problems

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billennium_%28short_story%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billennium_%28short_story%29)

------
kxter
They should look into the container park in downtown Las Vegas (Tony Hsieh's
pet project) which has been immensely successful - city codes and all! :)

------
comrh
Those look like a death trap if there were a fire. I also can't help but think
of Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys living in his storage shed.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
It does seem like cooking on a campstove is not a safe choice, induction
hotplates are cheap and powerful, assuming there's electricity.

------
rhaps0dy
I actually like the shipping containers. They're a bit expensive, but I guess
at the rate of everything else it's about what you're gonna get.

------
godisdad
I smell another Docker pivot

------
jvehent
Maybe it's time tech companies let their engineers globally work remotely from
comfortable places, instead of parking them into metal boxes and sweetening
the deal with catered lunches.

~~~
ryanSrich
+1 - However you'll find no love within the HN crowd. YC and many SV startups
are vehemently against remote work. That's why I was stunned when YC allowed
for new fellowship applicants to work remotely (so maybe it's getting
better...?).

I think a lot of it has todo with ego, investor show-ponying and lack of solid
culture. Beyond that many startups justify paying their employees like shit
for small office perks like free lunch and couches. That type of stuff doesn't
really work remotely.

~~~
ghaff
I do understand the desire for co-located teams up to a certain point. Today,
I certainly work outside an office more than inside. That said, I have a lot
of trouble seeing how remote work would have been a net positive when I was
starting out. Admittedly, technologies we had available for communication
weren't as good then but that part of my career was so dominated by F2F
interactions that it's hard to imagine I would have been as effective as a
remote worker. (I was a product manager for mostly system hardware.)

~~~
ryanSrich
I 100% agree. Remote working has really only worked for the past 5-10 years
(probably less than 10).

Async chat tools, file sharing, conference calls, video chats, etc. are the
lifeblood of communication at remote companies. Without those tools it's very
hard to make remote working work.

People who say remote work doesn't work often times still rely on things like
email...that's just not how it works. If you're communicating internally via
email you're doing it wrong.

That's not to say tools define remote culture, but they certainly help
reinforce it.

~~~
ghaff
Today's tools are certainly better. We had conference calls (and internal-only
email) but basically none of the other tools you list. And maybe if a company
had a real remote worker culture, it would be natural to slip into it even as
a new hire. It's just a bit hard for me to imagine based on my own experience.
But, as I say, different time and different culture.

