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This family signs the mortgage papers for their first home, an affordable, storm-ready, innovative house in St. Petersburg, Florida.
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The goal of this project was to construct an affordable, storm-ready home as part of an effort to revitalize a neighborhood that had been facing urban decay. The home was a prototype for creating affordable homes using abandoned steel shipping containers converted into intermodal steel building units (ISBU's) for safe, quick, and low-cost construction.
Rebuilding a Neighborhood
The Bartlett Park neighborhood, once home to seasonal residents, dates back to the 1920's. Recently, the neighborhood had become overrun with drug dealers and criminal-types who found shelter in boarded-up, neglected homes. For the past decade or so, SPNHS has been working to reclaim the neighborhood, by rebuilding or replacing the uninhabitable homes, and helping first-time homeowners move in and take ownership of the community. "We have a long-term commitment to the neighborhood," says Askia Aquil, Executive Director of the SPNHS, of Bartlett Park. "We've developed 20 or 30 houses over the last few years," he says.
SPNHS is supported in this project by the Home Depot Foundation, NeighborWorks America, and former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Warrick Dunn, whose "Home for Holidays" charity has helped six single-mom families find homes in the St. Petersburg area.
Applying Innovative Building Solutions
It takes innovative thinking and a commitment to affordable technologies to use converted steel shipping containers as the framework for storm-ready, affordable homes. It is not standard building practice, so the project faced challenges as the builders worked to perfect the process. "A lot of details had to be ironed out as we went," says Aquil, including the need to disguise the joints between the steel and the foundation, the steel and the gabled end of the roof, and all of the seams.
There are also elements of this projects that will be judged over time. SuperTherm ceramic coating was used on the exterior of the home to provide a high degree of thermal insulation. SuperTherm is not yet widely used for residential application in the U.S., so its long-term viability is somewhat unknown. "The jury is still out on it," Aquill says, adding that the lack of an on-site SuperTherm technical expert left more questions than answers. "It can be sprayed on metal, sure, but what about stucco?" Aquil asks. "What happens 10 years from now?" These answers are critical to the success of an affordable housing project, where durable, low-maintenance materials are required.
Aquil definitely sees ISBU construction as a viable means to providing storm-ready housing. "It is easy to envision single-family and multi-family options using this form of construction," Aquil says. "They are small, affordable, set up quickly, and certainly deploy as quickly as FEMA trailers."
The Bartlett Park home went from design, to permit, to final walk-through in just ten months, which is remarkable given the code requirements and new technologies employed. "It is really amazing how quickly a team was pulled together," says Aquil. "Most homes take nine months to complete after the permits are secured. This one was done from January to November." And in December of 2006, first-time homeowners moved into the Bartlett Park house, marking the real highlight of the project.
A Housing Success Story
"We have a pipeline of families who are looking to become homeowners," says Aquil. "For this home, we had to consider that this was a special project, that the house was a showpiece, and we also needed to find a buyer quickly." The family selected to buy and move into the Bartlett Park container-built home is a single mom with three children. "There's a boy and girl, both teenagers, both active in their community," Aquil says proudly, and a younger girl as well. "The mom is single, working, and taking classes at the college."
Despite having to deal with the occasional curious passer-by, the family has settled easily into the neighborhood. Matching a family to a realtor, helping with the first-month's mortgage, and educating first-time homeowners on the responsibilities of homeownership are all SPNHS services. In this case, a qualified, single-parent family found an affordable, storm-ready home featuring cutting-edge design in a revitalized neighborhood. The home, which ended up at roughly 1,800 square feet, sold for $170,000. "The house looks good," Aquil says, "and the family is doing well."
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