Shipping containers eyed for affordable housing

While city councillors lock horns on Monday over secondary suite reform, Calgary’s planning chief is gauging the merits of using shipping containers and backyard “cottages” as low-cost housing solutions.

“There’s tremendous potential here,” said Rollin Stanley, general manager of planning, development and assessment. “It’s a fabulous way to get some really creative housing in at lower rates in a community where we need more affordable-type units.”

A new city report on secondary suite policy references alternative housing forms adopted in other cities, such as Katrina cottages (small, self-contained shelters conceived in the wake of the 2005 hurricane in the U.S.), and steel shipping containers that can be stacked and retrofitted into modern, affordable single-family homes or multi-level buildings.

Stanley’s interest in container and cottage homes is, in part, spurred by Calgary’s near-zero rental vacancy rate, rising rents, a scarcity of affordable housing options, booming population growth and a demographic shift on the horizon.

“This isn’t just for people who don’t have a lot of money,” Stanley said.

“This is for people who are working in this city who don’t make enough money to buy the houses because it’s a very expensive place here.”

Additionally, Calgary’s senior population is expected to triple — from 100,000 to more than 300,000 — by 2042. And city estimates suggest the seniors will exceed the number of kids in Calgary for the first time by the early 2030s.

“We’ve got a senior citizens crisis if we don’t come up with creative housing solutions,” Ward 7 Coun. Druh Farrell, a proponent of both container homes and backyard cottages.

“If you have aging parents you can bring a temporary home into your backyard,” Farrell said. “They’re on site, they still have some independence but you can take care of them. And it’s not isolating senior citizens in a building somewhere. It’s integrating them into neighbourhoods.”

Farrell noted shipping containers also have retail applications and the potential to transform and invigorate “orphan” properties. In Sunnyside, community groups installed a temporary container village on a barren half-acre field near the LRT station.

And this summer saw the owners of two Kensington restaurants open a small patio bar, Container Bar, using a recycled metal shipping container.

“Until you’ve seen them in other places, and they can be very funky, few people would think of them as a building material,” said Farrell. “But once you’ve seen the applications in other places and how highquality they can look I imagine Calgarians would welcome them.”

Calgary certainly isn’t the first Canadian city to consider cottages or shipping containers as an alternative, low-cost and nimble housing option. In 2013, a Vancouverbased agency built the country’s first social housing development. The three-storey housing project in the Downtown Eastside features 12 self-contained units about 290 square feet.

While city planners, politicians and residents were initially dubious of using decommissioned steel shipping containers to build a low-income housing project, the development ultimately met or exceeded all building codes, said Janice Abbott, chief executive for Atira Women’s Resource Society.

“Containers are constructed out of high-grade steel, they’re solid and infinity reusable,” Abbott said. “It’s probably not going to become the preferred way to construct buildings … but I think it will become more mainstream.”

While Atira claims each unit costs $82,500 for hard construction as compared to $220,000 per unit in a conventional concrete building, Abbott cautions against comparisons.

“You can’t say definitively that container housing is cheaper,” she said. “That’s part of our interest in doing more because we do believe it’s a cheaper form of construction, but we need to do a couple of projects to demonstrate that.”

While Stanley believes current building codes and zoning bylaws would permit — or be easily tailored to allow — shipping container or cottage homes, it remains to be seen whether city leaders will champion the idea.

“You can do a lot of these things already,” he said. “It becomes a point of taking a leadership role to show people, ‘Have you thought about using containers?’ It’s a cheap, inexpensive way to build very nice housing and get it in the ground fast.”