Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Can-do attitude in housing

Those gigantic metal crates you see on the back of semis, stacked high on ships and rolling by on trains may soon rest on permanent soil in North Las Vegas - with people resting in them.

Houses in the rapidly expanding city are expensive. Used steel cargo containers are cheap, and thousands sit abandoned across the country. If you could use the containers to build modest homes, it would be affordable for those earning less than six figures.

That, at least, is the simple logic of developer Arnold Stalk.

Believing that recycled containers would make cheap and durable houses, Stalk hopes to drive home the point somewhere in North Las Vegas over the next 12 months.

An architect and partner in Metro Development Group, Stalk has models for single-family homes, studio apartments and a community center - all made of several containers - on a table in his West Sahara Avenue office. Now he wants to make the cardboard creations spring to life.

There's little in his way, except a few pesky city codes.

"The design standards require a certain exterior look, so they would need to apply a stucco or stone veneer to the sides of these containers so they look like a residential home," said Robert Eastman, North Las Vegas' principal planner.

City code also requires garages. That won't be a big problem, Stalk said.

The Instant Built Homes would not look like the cargo containers - each about 300 square feet - but instead would appear much like typical small homes.

"It's going to look better than the stucco boxes you see all over the valley," Stalk said. "It's going to look nice."

Stalk, who said he's looking at several potential sites in North Las Vegas, is not the first one to come up with the idea. Structures created from the containers can be found around the world.

But he is the first to attempt to bring the scheme into the valley. And perhaps the first to try to mass produce the homes.

Stalk said he has met with Federal Emergency Management Agency officials and lawmakers about the use of the homes as emergency housing.

The idea of "cargotecture" has spread quickly, a combination of environmental activism and architecture design.

In St. Petersburg, Fla., a group has started recycling used containers into low-cost, hurricane-resistant housing. In Colorado, a group of artists began a program creating cargo-container studios. Luna County, N.M., has used the containers as additional jail space. A Japanese clothing company turned to cargo containers for temporary New York stores, and in Miami, artists have used them as galleries.

Several fully designed cargo houses are already on the market, available for purchase. New Jersey architect Adam Kalkin designed the Quik House, a kit home built around five recycled shipping containers. Vogue magazine called it "the chicest weekend retreat one can buy for $99,000."

Stalk's single-family homes would be built with four containers. They would be anchored on a solid caisson footing, brand named Hurricane Hold.

While the architect in Stalk loves the design challenges of making the heavy boxes into modern-looking homes, he's more interested in the project's potential for providing affordable homes.

"It is a solution," he said. "Someone has to start doing something.

"They can sit around and talk all about affordable housing and have fancy commissions and blue ribbon committees, but that is the oldest trick in the book. All they do is sit around for two years talking and do nothing."

Stalk is taking action, already spending about $150,000 in research and design costs. He also has established a nonprofit group to help find buyers.

In the meantime, while awaiting approval from North Las Vegas officials, Stalk is continuing to, well, think outside the box.

"There's clearly some good points to it and they are very well built," Eastman said. "They just need to fit in."

Sun reporter Brian Wargo contributed to this report.

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