Architect, students build ‘instant’ house

With decorating help from student volunteers at the Meadows School and a $50,000 grant from a local family foundation, Las Vegas architect Arnold Stalk is turning a used steel shipping container into a prototype house suitable for a family of four.

Stalk hopes the demonstration project, currently taking shape beside a baseball field at the Meadows School in Summerlin, will prove that decent and functional -- if not very fancy -- housing can be set up in short order for people displaced by hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis. Stalk's idea is to mass produce his Instant-Built Houses and park them on military bases, ready for immediate transport by air, rail or 18-wheel truck to the next disaster area.

The shell of an Instant-Built House is the standard steel shipping container box used on ocean freighters and railroads. Known as ISO (International Standard Organization) modules, the hollow boxes measure 40 feet long by 8 feet wide with a height of 8 feet (some stand 8 feet, 8 inches tall). There are 250 million ISO containers in use worldwide with as many as 12.5 million currently sitting unused at ports around the world, including 44,000 at San Pedro Harbor in California, according to Stalk.

To convert them into housing, ISO containers would be retrofitted with the addition of windows, walls, insulation, hot and cold running water, a kitchen, bathroom with septic tank, roof-top air-conditioning unit, solar panels and a generator, among other amenities, Stalk said. Conversions would cost from $18,000 to $25,000 per unit, Stalk estimated. A new ISO container costs about $5,500 and a used one goes for about $3,000, he said.

"This thing's been banged up a bit," Stalk said, pointing to the well-traveled brown steel container sitting on desert sand field at the Meadows School awaiting overhaul by a crew of eager students. "It's been on the ocean for a long time."

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, speaking at a May 14 press conference held at the project site on the school campus in Summerlin, applauded the idea of using ISO containers as emergency housing following a disaster and also suggested the units might be useful as temporary housing to get homeless off the streets of Las Vegas.

"I like the idea, from the mayor's point of view, to use this for transitional housing," Goodman said. "This fits right in with our 10-year plan to end homelessness. It's a natural. You can build a unit where people can live and have a sanitary, decent, comfortable place to go home after they go to work."

Providing adequate housing for the homeless population of Clark County, estimated at 11,370 in an April survey, has been the elusive goal of local government officials for years. The high cost of housing in the Las Vegas Valley and the public's aversion to higher taxes creates a barrier to government spending on shelter for the homeless.

Goodman said the relative low cost of Instant-Built Houses and the possibility of getting grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development -- combined with potential low-cost land acquisition through the federal Bureau of Land Management -- make this idea "a natural" for local governments wanting to help the homeless, including those people thrust into sudden crisis by foreclosure.

"It could be used for people who can't make their rent or pay their mortgages and they're about to hit the street," Goodman said. "They can go in here on a temporary basis -- that's great. I mean, this is not what you would call a permanent residence, but certainly this could be used a number of different ways to transition people out of serious problems with natural disasters and serious problems as far as economics...."

Given the high cost of houses, condos and mobile homes, purchasing a box-shaped house fashioned from a shipping container could become a real option for some families wanting a low-cost starter home, said Stalk, who is also the owner of Metro Development Group, LLC. Assuming the cost of land acquisition was born by some government entity, a developer might be able to price a single-family Instant-Built House at "under $75,000," Stalk said, but only if building and planning codes were expedited to reduce costs and certain fees were waived.

The Instant-Built House prototype is under construction on the campus of the Meadows School because the parents of Meadows junior Josh Friedman provided $50,000 to Stalk's nonprofit SHARE organization to overhaul and decorate the model.

Friedman, 17, recently read an article in which Stalk outlined his idea for converting ISO containers into temporary housing for disaster victims and persuaded his parents, David and Abbey Friedman, to make a donation through their Friedman Family Foundation. Josh Friedman and his parents made only one stipulation: the prototype had to be built on Meadows School property by his fellow students, "kids who have love for it," he said.

Josh Friedman recruited dozens of his classmates to put in a total of "120 hours of intense construction" over a two-week period to make the ISO demonstration container livable. They will be assisted by architects from Spellman Partners, which is donating its design expertise.

Stalk said the finished prototype will be unveiled May 31 and he is confident he can persuade officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take a look at it.