Building Structures Out of Shipping Containers

A story at the Daily Mail about building homes, apartment buildings, offices, etc., out of old shipping containers. 

With the demand for affordable housing on the rise across the country, some developers in cities like Detroit and Seattle have been using a truly outside-the-box thinking to come up with a solution to the problem: building condominiums out of discarded shipping containers.

About 25 million of these 20-by-40 feet boxes move through U.S. ports every year, hauling everything from children’s toys to computers and chemicals.

In the past, when a container was retired from service in the shipping industry, it would end up discarded in a ship yard to be slowly consumed by rust. But now, the colourful steel boxes get a new lease on life by being transformed into apartments, art studios, office buildings and even restaurants.

HyBrid Architecture, based in Seattle, Washington, has been building housing from containers for nearly 10 years now and is credited with coining the term 'cargotecture' to describe this ‘green’ approach to construction, ABC News reported.

Homes and businesses pieced together out of the multicolored boxes which can be purchased for as little as $2,500 each have been springing up from coast to coast in recent years.

Why would anyone want to spend money to build more housing in Detroit, when they practically have the lowest housing prices in the U.S.?