Explorer West students share idea for creating low-cost housing

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(From left, teacher Tim, students Jackson, Grant, Henry, Riley)

As we noted in an earlier story, Explorer West Middle School (WSB sponsor) 8th graders are tasked with working in groups on major projects to research, plan, and present big ideas to “change the world.” Rather than just let their ideas and proposals stay within the confines of the campus, most if not all of the groups found ways to share them with the community. In the case of one group, its members wrote a story about their project and invited us to publish it:

Four Explorer West Middle School students – Riley Walden, Jackson Cecil, Henry Burton, and Grant Gerberding – started a project to reduce homelessness in King County and Seattle.

The project assigned by History/Social Studies teacher Tim Owens was to research, plan, do, and analyze the data, then present it to panelists. They decided to research on housing for homeless people.

One of the group members, Riley Walden, pitched his idea of using retrofitted shipping containers as temporary or even permanent homes. They decided to specifically work on this idea, and with more research, they found that Seattle was a perfect place to house the containers.

After extensive research, they wrote to elected officials Kshama Sawant, Sally Bagshaw (Seattle City Councilmembers), Larry Phillips (King County Councilmember), and Bill Bryant (Seattle Port Commissioner).

As they researched how this could work, they also looked at possible locations for these retrofitted shipping containers. The ideal location they came up with was Terminal 5 in Seattle. This was the ideal location because it was inbetween West Seattle and Downtown Seattle to give homeless people a wide variety of places to work; one of the issues that homeless people face is getting a job near a place to live, so Terminal 5 was ideal because you could easily get anywhere from A to B without a massive amount of bus transfers. It also was being cleared out for an “upgrade,” so there was a lot of space for the containers to be placed. They also looked at the security that Terminal 5 offered, as it is already fenced off from the public.

They wrote letters to members of the Seattle City Council and the King County Council, and within days received replies back from the officials. Kshama Sawant expressed great interest in this idea, and even invited them to speak at the Affordable Housing Town Hall meeting on April 23rd, where they presented the idea.

(Henry, Riley, and Grant at City Hall)
Almost 500 people were at the meeting and gave the students very good feedback, including some from Sawant herself.

Another reason they believe that shipping containers could be used is because of their portability. Instead of building a million-dollar structure you could house a family of homeless in a twenty thousand dollar, refurbished shipping container with everything you would find in a house. One other advantage of using shipping containers as housing is they can last up to 25 years with no maintenance so that would only be an average purchase price of eight hundred dollars a year. Assuming there are over 800 people in West Seattle you would only pay less than one dollar a year. There is also the fact that we don’t need to put this in one location, we can put it on 50 locations or 5 locations throughout King County and we would pay such a small price to house a tremendous amount of homeless. Let’s not forget that there is an surplus of containers.

With all of the vacant lots around the country, they could easily be moved. This would also allow us to spend very little money on property, as we could make it a possibility that the working homeless pay a small part of the expenses (probably around five pecent) so we could continue expanding the program. We also thought of things like solar and wind energy to produce electricity so we don’t have to take so much in from the city’s power. The only issue with that is, solar power would only generate power during the day, and no one wants a 500-foot wind turbine, so we wanted to create a way that you can create energy from wind that is high enough that trees don’t get in the way but not so tall that they block views or are an eyesore, so we decided that two or three shipping containers could supply enough height for a small wind turbine to produce a good amount of electricity.

A normal container is eight feet tall and high cube containers around nine foot six inches, so achieving a 24- or 28-foot-six-inch high structure is not all that bad looking; remember that these are retrofitted, so they can look quite nice. So with a few solar panels and a few small wind turbines, you can certainly produce enough energy for homeless people living there. Another possibility we thought of was possibly a small garden for people to care for while they are staying there. Another possibility: A volunteer service project to help homeless people who are on the streets get into their homes. They can also work for a company that hires homeless people, doing work at a food bank, or they could work to build affordable housing for homeless people.

(EDITOR’S NOTE #2: Since the school year is over and EW 8th graders including this group have presented their projects to reviewers, we asked Riley what’s happened since their presentations: “We have finished the project in history class and sent business letters to the two companies who retrofit the containers and are hoping to hear from them. We are stil highly passionate and interested in the topic but will not be able to continue this project as a group anymore. If we get invited to speak to one or both of the companies or meet someone or an organization who is interested in constructing these, we will reach out to each other if they want to and can work right then; otherwise it will just be one of us doing the work. We would like to hear what people think about it and if anyone is interested that has power in the housing community we would love to talk to them about it.” You can contact Riley via rileyw.99@gmail.com.)

Bree June 21, 2015 (2:56 pm)

Thank you for caring and reaching out. Families are out there, seniors are out there and it is hard to find a place for them. We have been trying for several months to find a place for several seniors and keep coming up against waiting lists upon waiting lists. Our heart goes out to the many that are homeless and often not their fault. So many low income buildings being torn down and no where to go. The ones we are assisting had their place sold out from under them….more to the story which will not go into here.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for caring. We knew there was homelessness – just did not know how hard it was to find a low income place to stay until we started helping. Yes, we have all the resources and still come up against all the waiting lists.

miws June 21, 2015 (3:42 pm)

Thank you, Jackson, Grant, Henry, Riley, for taking this task on.

And thank you too, Bree, for all that you are doing.

Mike

Vincent Dakotah Langley June 21, 2015 (4:18 pm)

Thank you all really so very much!!! Bree is right. There is almost nothing out there in any community anymore for people looking for lower-cost housing. Here in the Seattle, Washington area, planners and developers need to start doing new construction starts so that, when a building or a project is completed, there are a certain number of low income apartments in that new building or in those new buildings. It ought to be the law, in fact — and, with the construction boom that is going on all of the time, this would assure that there are ever constantly new low income apartments everywhere, opening up all of the time for rental! Rent control is not really a good idea because what it would do here in the Seattle, WA area as it does everywhere that it is implimented is that it only discourages real estate developers from building new apartment buildings and low income apartment complexes, because, once opened and renting out apartment units, the managements of these properties cannot then make enough money for the real estate project to have been financially feasable, in the first place. Please consider these two, different ideas further, if you will. …Oh, and, by the way, the latter of these two ideas is not — in any way, shape or form whatsoever — my idea, at all. It is an idea, on the other hand, that has already been put forth to the city council of the City of Seattle, WA. However, up to the present date, the Seattle City Council simply has not acted on it. Hopefully, they will act on it by this fall, if not sometime over this summer. …And, speaking of summer, 2015, HAPPY FIRST DAY OF SUMMER to you all!!!

cjboffoli June 21, 2015 (4:48 pm)

Great to see young students working proactively on design solutions for one of our most persistent social problems and with an item that is very readily available in our port city.

Though I wonder if the students have worked through how to overcome some of the more challenging aspects of shipping container use. Even empty they are very heavy and tricky to move, requiring heavy machinery that burns a lot of fossil fuels. They are coated with chemicals that make them very durable for use at sea but that are hazardous to human health: phosphate and lead-based paints, chromate, arsenic-based pressure-treated wood interiors. They are long, narrow, windowless boxes that require sandblasting before habitation and that will need to have openings cut into them with torches. They’ll also need to be insulated, which will make the interior even more narrow. While they are more durable than a stick frame structure they do require a lot of processing before use (not to mention regular painting to keep away rust), which is time and resource intensive and that generates a significant amount of hazardous waste. Stick frame structures usually pencil out as a more sensible solution.