Michigan legislative action thread
Posted on 01/04/2015 2:12:50 PM PST by lowbridge
An unusual home taking shape inside General Motors' sprawling Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant is intended to be part of a movement to rebuild the city's economy and deteriorating, disappearing housing stock.
Skilled-trades workers, taking breaks from their tasks at the factory that produces the electric Chevrolet Volt and other vehicles, dart in and out to do door, window and wall installation and framing, as well as electrical and plumbing work. Meanwhile, a nonprofit urban farming group is preparing property a few miles away that will welcome the project, what's believed to be the city's first occupied shipping container homestead.
Come spring, the house-in-progress will be delivered to Detroit's North End neighborhood and secured on a foundation where a blighted home once stood. After finishing touches and final inspections, the 40-foot-long former container will feature 320 square feet of living space with two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen, and will serve as home base for a university-student caretakers of a neighborhood farm and agricultural research activities.
One shipping container home won't turn around Detroit's housing woes. The city emerging from bankruptcy has roughly 40,000 vacant homes waiting to be demolished. But it's a start and, organizers hope, a model to lure and keep residents as Detroit removes blight and recovers from bankruptcy.
Shipping containers converted into living or working spaces are common in some other cities. For instance, in Salt Lake City's rundown warehouse district, a nonprofit group last year converted them into "micro-retail" spaces. A Seattle-based company designs and builds houses out of reclaimed containers.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
With gas prices approaching 1.50/gal. in many parts of the country, those Chevy Volt workers will have plenty of time to make container houses. Maybe the Prius workers can make dumpster houses in their spare time.
I like the idea; if a neighborhood goes to pot just move it somewhere else. Of course, in Detroit I’d never uncouple it from the truck...
As the Red Chinese buy up our homes and buildings here, we’re buying up their shipping containers to live in. Sounds like a good plan.
Carlyle is buying trailer parks.
That tells you where the “smart money” views the future.
LOL. However, I’m a little confused.
War Zone Detroit has tens of thousands of abandoned or vacant homes.
available to buy on the cheap. I do not understand this concept.
Unless it is some government program creating jobs.
If these are to be low-income housing, then what prevents them from being demolished by the Section 8s? Why would they treat these dumpsters (er, “containers”) any differently than other housing?
The abandoned/vacant homes are often not inhabitable, and would require a lot of money to refurbish. Why do that at a time when more & more people have no intention of having children or committing to a thirty year mortgage?
I agree. Put the whole home into storage if you need to.
Does insulation need to be added to these containers to make them cosy in winter?
I don’t get it. How is this really any different/better than a typical trailer?
New future jobs for the UAW. Doubt this is all about altruism, but then I’ve become extremely cynical in the last six years.
They’re typically made from .075 inch thick sheet steel.
So no insulation factor there, but it can be added interior or exterior.
Oh, hello California. Didn't see you raising your hand there.
I’d think they need insulation; I would have thought this concept would take off in places with a nicer winter than Detroit.
You make a good point, but in Cali the odds of those being legal for zoning, building code, etc is probably miniscule.
>>War Zone Detroit has tens of thousands of abandoned or vacant homes.
available to buy on the cheap. I do not understand this concept.
Those homes are trashed by the ferals. It would cost a lot of money to renovate them to Section 8 housing standards. If we still lived in a nation run by men, then men would take those houses (regardless of the government’s rules) and fix them up for their families.
But, manly skills like plumbing, carpentry, and electrical are beneath the loftiness of most people’s “self-esteem” so they would sit there in the rain and cold before they’d lift a finger to do anything like work—especially if no one is paying them for it.
I’ve seen it after storms. Grown men standing around bitching about the trees blocking the street so the power company can’t get in to restore power. They argue that it is the city’s job to remove the trees, so the power crew leaves and moves on to a place where they can work. It doesn’t happen in blue collar communities, but it happens in welfare neighborhoods and in the upscale neighborhoods.
It turned out used trailers were also dirt cheap and required a whole lot less modification. Biggest expense in the container housing construction (even worse than the plumbing hook-ups) was pouring the concrete slab.
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