Container Today, Home Tomorrow

If the alternative is sleeping out in the elements, taking up residence in a used steel shipping box-- 40 feet long and 8 feet wide -- isn't a bad deal at all. Especially when you take into account that a retrofitted container home can have windows, carpeting, a kitchenette with fridge and microwave oven, bathroom with toilet and shower, bunk beds and heating and air-conditioning units.

A prototype Instant-Built House was unveiled Thursday on the campus of The Meadows School in Summerlin, where student volunteers did the decorating work on a used ocean liner container hauled to Las Vegas from San Pedro Harbor in Southern California.

The Instant-Built House is the brainchild of Las Vegas developer and architect Arnold Stalk, who hopes the federal government will purchase hundreds or thousands of these units to temporarily house people displaced by hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman sees the potential for using these inexpensive, quickly produced structures as "transitional housing" to get homeless off the streets in Southern Nevada.

Through his nonprofit organization SHARE, Stalk obtained a used freight container, known as an ISO (International Shipping Organization) module, for $3,000 and converted it for about $25,000 more. The two-week retrofitting project was funded by a grant from the charitable family foundation of Las Vegans David and Abbie Friedman. Their son Joshua is a junior at The Meadows School who read about Stalk's idea in a newspaper and urged his parents, through their Friedman Family Foundation, to fund the prototype.

Meadows School students donated more than 300 hours of labor assisting architects and design professionals with décor and putting up drywall to create separate rooms -- a living area accessed by a sliding glass "front door," a kitchen, bathroom hooked to a septic tank, and a bedroom -- all inside a 40-foot-by-8-foot rectangular box with a 8-foot, 8-inch ceiling. The prototype is expected to remain on the school campus beside a baseball field throughout the summer with the public invited to stop by and inspect it. Call the office of Stalk's METRO Development Group at 604-4699 to schedule a visit.

U.S. Rep. Jon Porter, a Republican whose district includes Summerlin, cut the ribbon at the Instant-Built House unveiling and vowed to bring the prototype to the attention of the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- by having the unit transported by rail to Washington perhaps.

"That's our next mission, getting this module into D.C.," Porter declared.

Goodman said at the time the Instant-Built House idea was announced in mid-May that local government officials might try to secure funding through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to buy and retrofit an unspecified number of ISO containers for temporary homeless housing in Las Vegas.

Goodman said that living in a well-traveled steel shipping box "is not what you would call permanent housing," but rather a stopgap measure that would enable homeless individuals to have "a sanitary, decent, comfortable place" to call home as they find employment and put themselves in a financial position to secure permanent housing.

A single Instant-Built House can provide shelter for a family of four and ISO units can be stacked nine high, if necessary, with access ladders put in place, Stalk said. As many as 12.5 million ISO containers are currently sitting idle at ports and railroad yards worldwide, he said.