Shipping container homes Hawaii

The Faith Action for Community Equity (FACE) has turned a shipping container into a home for a family of five. The shipping container is located in Honolulu, Hawaii and cost about $11, 000 to construct.

The home was built out of a standard sized 20-foot-by-8-foot shipping container. Nothing on the outside of this 800 square-foot dwelling reveals that it is actually made from a shipping container. The interior is split up into two separate rooms, namely a kid’s bedroom with bunk beds, and a master bedroom for the parents. The home is also furnished with desks, and is also fully wired for electricity. Unfortunately the home does not feature a kitchen or a bathroom, which it easily could have, as we’ve seen in practically all the successful conversions of single shipping containers into homes.

A part of the reason for not including a kitchen and bathroom, is that the main aim of this project was to demonstrate how easily homes could be created for the less fortunate using shipping containers. FACE has spend the last few weeks promoting the home all over Honolulu, showing it to as many people as possible and demonstrating that shipping container homes are a viable solution to the housing problems in Hawaii. They are also going to be moving it around from city hall to different FACE-member churches to further demonstrate the benefits of using shipping containers to build homes. As a result of this, city officials have now already started looking more seriously into this possibility.

According to city estimates, Oahu needs 24, 000 additional housing units to address the growing demand for housing. And three quarters of the needed homes (roughly 18, 000) are needed by households with a yearly income of $76, 000 or less.

By adding a fully functional bathroom and kitchen to these units, they could easily fulfill the purpose of becoming the affordable homes of the future in Hawaii. However, with just the bedrooms, they are basically temporary shelters not suitable for long term rental. However, if they lead to Honolulu commissioning a wider scale project of building shipping container houses then these have already served their purpose.