CONTAINERS
apartment building, dubbed the Cargominium. Drivers heading west on Interstate 670 can’t miss the metal boxes, laid like giant Lego blocks on the site.
The building is the first of its kind in Columbus.
“We heard: ‘It’ll never happen. You can’t do it. The city will never allow it,’” said Derrick Pryor, principal of AES Development, the project developer. “And now we have something that’s an absolute disruption to the housing and real-estate industry.”
The Cargominium is the brainchild of Michele Reynolds, founder and chief executive officer of Nothing Into Something Real Estate, a faith-based nonprofit housing organization established in 2006.
Reynolds had seen accounts of shipping containers used as housing and thought the idea nicely reflected her group’s mission to rebuild lives.
“To take shipping containers — basic building blocks — and to make something of them and turn them into housing seemed very true to our name,” Reynolds said.
The homes will be occupied by low-income residents, including many “in transition” such as those recovering from addiction or moving out of prisons or homeless shelters.
Reynolds worked for three years before securing financial backing to build the Cargominium on an empty lot across from the housing organization’s headquarters in the North Central Area neighborhood. The neighborhood of mostly vacant lots and industrial buildings, peppered with older homes and sandwiched between I-670 and railroad yards, has seen little investment in years.
Reynolds and Tiffany White, chairwoman of the North Central Area Commission, believe the Cargominium could change that.
“I think it’s a good fit for the community,” White said. “I’m excited about the opportunity to have it in our area and to see what it leads to.”
The Columbus architectural firm Moody Nolan designed the building to include 25 nearly identical two-bedroom apartments on three floors that are accessible from exterior stairways. Each apartment is built from two 8-by-40-foot shipping containers, for a total of 640 square feet each. 1562 Old Leonard Ave.
Soon, passers-by won’t know that shipping containers form the heart of the building. The interiors will contain some exposed steel, but the exterior will be covered by stucco.
“I didn’t want people to think we’re putting people into a trailer park or a metal box,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds and Pryor worked with the Detroit company Three Squared to locate shipping containers in New Jersey. Three Squared then arranged for a New Jersey company to cut window and door openings. Once prepared, the containers were shipped to the site in order, 30 minutes apart, allowing a crane to set them into place as each arrived.
“Planning is crucial,” said Barry Cummings, president of the Columbus firm Chelsi Technologies, general contractor of the Cargominium. “This is definitely an engineering feat.”
The containers took builders one week to form into a building, compared with up to three months for conventional framing.
“One day you look, and it’s the site,” Pryor said. “The next day, it’s there.”
The time saved in labor reduced the project cost to about $2.3 million — about 30 percent less than the cost of a conventionally constructed building, Reynolds and Pryor said.
Shipping-container buildings have other advantages: Their stability, for example, allows them to withstand winds up to 150 mph (or more, when tethered), said Leslie Horn, chief executive officer of Three Squared, which has erected shipping-container buildings in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.
Shipping containers have been used for several years as buildings, but their popularity has mushroomed in the past few years, said Barry Naef, managing director of the Intermodal Steel Building Unit Association, which represents those seeking uses for shipping containers.
Naef expects about 450 residential buildings to be made of shipping containers this year, compared with a few dozen annually before 2012, when the use of shipping containers started to attract greater interest.
Shipping containers seemingly haven’t found a large audience in Ohio or the rest of the Midwest, but the pendulum might be shifting. A few years ago, three stores in the Warehouse District of Cleveland were built from shipping containers, and, in 2015, Habitat for Humanity of Greater Cincinnati unveiled a shipping-container home as a possible model.
Elsewhere, individuals have used containers as homes, including a Columbus couple building a retreat in the Hocking Hills.
Industry experts say the Cargominium is the first building made of shipping containers in Columbus other than a model home built last year for The Columbus Dispatch Home & Garden Show. The model is now in storage.
Although no authoritative list of shipping-container buildings exists, Naef and Horn think the Cargominium will be the largest residential building in the nation made of shipping containers.
“The next largest viable project is only 22 units,” said Naef, citing a project in Washington, D.C.
Horn said her company is under contract to build about 600 housing units from shipping containers in the next three years.
Reynolds and Pryor are already planning their next such project, one that will offer units for sale instead of for rent. They declined to provide details but are confident that Cargominium won’t be their last such work.
“This is a model we hope to replicate nationally,” Reynolds said. “There’s an affordable-housing crisis, and this is a solution.”