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 ...
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Looks like one of those $1 ‘bidforassets’ homes in Detroit.
The tornado that whacked her old neighborhood (she'd moved away two or three years earlier) was one of three that touched down the same day, all F4's or F5's, and later I saw satellite imagery of their tracks, you could follow them across the state in almost a straight line >60 miles and see where they'd been. It was amazing.
She was so glad she moved away to Tennessee, it was sad seeing what had happened to her old neighborhood. But her old house was still there, minus (I think) the carport.
I see! Thank you for the plausible explanation.
Wiring is easy enough to do: just drill a hole and feed in a line. Plumbing is a different story. What did you have? Outdoor latrines? Porta-potties?
My daughter lived in Seattle in 89. She came home right after the tornado. It hit the neighborhood where some of her high school friends lived. We could not believe the damage. There was a lot of damage on Airport Rd. Cars were piled on top of others, buildings were damaged or destroyed. My late husband had just gone under the traffic light in that area when the power went out. It is unbelievable the damage caused by those storms unless you see it. We respect them and take precautions.
Shipping containers generally have thin metal walls, well less than 3/16” thick, except for the four posts on the corners and the eight heavy castings on each end of the posts. Most of them that I have seen have holes in them. Old ones have many holes in them.
Converting containers into homes is stupid for a lot of reasons. The only reason some people are doing that is because a lot of containers are built in China for a one-way trip to the US and abandoned here.
Wiring is easy enough to do: just drill a hole and feed in a line. Plumbing is a different story. What did you have? Outdoor latrines? Porta-potties?
Hey, it was a five star resort compared to what we had when we were outside the wire.
New businesses have a lot of obstacles in this horrible economy; I’d like to see them start up, but understand why prospective owners are reluctant.
Here in NJ opening a new business is just signing on for your share of a huge IOU to government workers who retired twenty years ago. That is also why the moving companies are reporting twice as many moves out of the state as in...which is also the reason why we’re a “sanctuary state” with a de facto amnesty that has been in place for decades...
This is just a way to getting around building codes. Same with mobile homes. Neither one will be built to the same standards as a stick built house has to be built to. Not without jacking the cost way way up.
If I am not mistaken a site built house can not be built to that low of a square footage. I know where I live in northern Michigan you will not be building some thing that small and meet the building codes.
Just another example of people trying to get around laws imposed by stupid people. They just keep adding more and more cost to building a house so that the lower income could never possibly afford one.
And why put this in a city with that many vacant houses. They are vacant for a reason.
" a university-student caretakers of a neighborhood farm and agricultural research activities. "
In other words yes, some lib college idea of inner-urban farming and communal harvesting, brought to you by union workers drifting on and off the line while still on the GM clock.
In my area (which has much less space than Michigan) I don’t think the square footage of a come is the problem; the larger concern is off-street parking. We have homes built in the last few decades that, even though they have a double-wide driveway and double garage, only have one space in front removed from the curb to provide access to the driveway. We also have towns with no overnight parking on the streets - all residences and businesses have to have off-street parking for all vehicles. Overall, I get the impression that people are being conditioned to accept a lot less living space (and everything else) as we’re reduced to Red China’s standard of living.
As for why they are trying this out in a city with so many vacant homes, I can only get they feel they have to try something. Nobody will live there at “before-times” pricing/tax levels, and this probably reduces both significantly.
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