From the New York Business Journal. April 17th, 2015
In Newark, New Jersey, a new residential development promises to provide a low-cost and relatively speedy model for affordable housing: using shipping containers to build condominiums.
Cor-10 Concepts and the nonprofit Community Asset Preservation Corp. have partnered on the project in the city’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, the Wall Street Journal explained, building a three-unit condo to start. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka strongly supports the project and told the WSJ that, pending this experiment’s success, he will push the city to expand use of shipping containers to build housing elsewhere in the city.
Using containers in this way is not new– they’ve been put to various building uses throughout the world, and perhaps most notably Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) has built several stores this way– but Cor-10 hopes their use spreads since the project can be built in as few as three months, compared with six months with more traditional methods.
Previously, Next City spoke with Cor-10 about the challenges they face designing homes for Americans using these materials, and that they’ve managed to create a design with three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and laundry in each unit.
That report cited estimates that a single container suitable for use in the project might cost $2,000, with roughly six containers used to construct each unit. In the end, these first units are expected to sell for between $200,000 and $280,000, according to various estimates passed on by Next City.
