Shipping container housing can solve many Hawaii problems

The Honolulu City Council unanimously passed Resolution 12-74 — aka the shipping container farm housing reso — with each member praising its author, Councilman Tom Berg, for working so hard to satisfy the Council’s concerns.

The city’s Department of Planning and Permitting, Building Division, is now tasked with creating guidelines for implementing these structures and presenting this to the Council — in hopes of allowing up to five shelters for farm workers on an agricultural lot for up to five years. Councilman Berg has asked me to work with the Building Division and state Wastewater Branch, lending my expertise with building-permitted shipping container dwellings.

Sina Pruder, head of the Wastewater Branch, assured me we can use composting toilets, so long as they are NSF-rated (National Sanitation Foundation), and two dwellings can share a fairly inexpensive 200 gallon tank and leach field for gray water disposal (shower and sink water).

The main focus now is to show Tim Hiu, acting chief of the city Building Division, that these dwellings do not need interior insulation. Heat reflective coatings work incredibly well, and a well-ventilated container is as cool as a cucumber using silicone or acrylic elastomeric coatings. We use them all the time with tremendous success. There exists heat gun data using these coatings on public school roofs. Interior insulation is very expensive.

Another issue: anchoring for hurricanes. Safety is always a significant concern to me, but a hurricane at worst might roll these units off their foundations. They will not be flying through the air and crashing into neighboring homes. All one has to do is lift the container home up with a small crane, place it back onto its foundation and restore services, if such an event were to occur. This farm-workers pilot program is only for five years, and anchoring them to survive a hurricane is going to cost a bit of money.

My company has a very positive relationship with the Hawaii County Building Department. Former Mayor Harry Kim arranged meetings for us, and we came out of those discussions with guidelines for container homes that worked well for everyone. They told me what they wanted; I explained how to accomplish it; and it was a win-win for affordable housing in Hawaii County. If similar meetings were facilitated in Honolulu, everyone involved would benefit in much the same way.

My main hope is that this program will be affordable for our dear farmers. There are many other applications, such as for homeless shelters. The big plus is giving people their own private space to sort out their lives. Putting large groups of homeless people into the same facility does not offer the privacy that a separate dwelling does.

Shipping container homes offer the lowest possible cost, greatest portability and highest strength. Our biggest customers are the state, U.S. military and the counties. They all know very well how much more it costs to enlist architects, engineers and contractors to build from scratch.

In hopes of getting more discussion going, I’ve put together a detailed proposal for 17 homes to be built on three acres of land in Waianae Valley, with a community center and garden. So far, a banker and several legislators I’ve talked with liked the idea but called it impossible because it would require cooperation between the state and county. But offering home ownership to families enables them to have a decent life: it gives people something to borrow against for things such as sending their kids to college.

I believe zoning can be changed, if our state and county governments could work together. Anything is possible, and I refuse to give up or limit my thinking.

Resolution 12-74 is landmark legislation. It is a great start, and I expect more positive legislation to follow. Stay tuned.