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Launch HN: Boxouse (YC W17) – Shipping-container homes

142 points by liseman ↗ HN
Hi HN! We're Luke and Heather, founders of boxouse: https://boxouse.com. We build portable, beautiful(ish), affordable smart homes out of used shipping containers in our West Oakland factory. This began out of our frustration with paying high rent for crappy apartments: we started thinking about our monthly rent in terms of how many shipping containers we could buy (2 per month!). We're particularly interested in using containers as a tool to increase density and affordability; among other things, we're going to deploy containers to people's yards for free, sharing the rent revenue with them. We do all the construction ourselves; more than happy to dig into technical details!

155 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] thread
cbr
How are you going to deal with zoning? Generally the big problem with tiny houses is that while they're relatively cheap to make they're not allowed by existing zoning.
liseman
IMHO, zoning is is one of the biggest challenges facing anybody who wants to do something interesting in real estate. CA actually is forcing cities to make it easier to build ADUs: http://www.hcd.ca.gov/policy-research/docs/17Jan30-ADU-TA-Me... . Worst case, we put wheels on them and have license plates to avoid having to comply with building regulations;)
komali2
I hate to be that guy but "putting wheels on them" is not a simple solution at all... it will take a lot more than that to make your cargo containers street-legal.
dragonwriter
> Worst case, we put wheels on them and have license plates to avoid having to comply with building regulations;)

Once they are vehicles, it's much easier for them to be impounded for violating parking and other vehicle-related regulations, which the proposed uses seem as likely to break as building regulations.

iamacynic
a good service add-on would be help with getting one installed in various jurisdictions. i.e., what exactly is the process to get one installed on a plot of land in unincorporated Los Angeles County? (or wherever) who do i need to call and permit in order to not get kicked off my own land?

right now, that process is completely opaque and mysterious, and people who have done it don't seem to want to share.

willholloway
Many places treat these types of dwellings as mobile homes, and there is probably no form of development that is more widely banned than mobile home parks.

Even putting one of these on your own lot as an accessory structure is going to be very difficult in much of the country.

These rules are all legally codified class discrimination, and is very much largely about middle class single family homeowners keeping out what they call "undesirables".

In their worldview, "undesirables" can include anything from a mixed use building with commercial on first floor and an apartment on top, to turning a single family home into a duplex, but there is nothing more detested by these folks than mobile home parks.

It's an American caste system and it leads to unnecessary high housing prices. Very broadly, America doesn't want to invest in fixing social problems and there is a big focus on just moving the problem to other areas. The counter-productive part of this is that high housing costs drain resources from families and that induced poverty state leads to the social problems that are trying to be hidden in the first place.

Zoning is in need of serious reform, it is possible to go up against it and it is possible to win. I have, but it wasn't easy, and you really need public opinion on your side.

Market positioning can make the difference, and there is opportunity for things to change due to the bad economic position many towns find themselves in. Many places simply can't afford their snobbery anymore.

The rebranding happening with the tiny home movement has a chance at breaking through this and I hope that it does.

I would love to develop a piece of land with a group of affordable small houses but it's a total non starter in my area.

brudgers
Mobile homes have a distinct legal disadvantage: they are classified as vehicles rather than real property. Local municipalities have statutes on the books that readily allow impounding vehicles and regulating their parking that are much more 'action oriented' than the legal formalities for liening real property for zoning non-compliance.
asciimo
Looks like they learned some lessons the hard way. They were forced out of their original location by Oakland. "Iseman said after the inspection at 2836 Union Street that it might have cost $200,000 to $300,000 to bring the property and containers into compliance with building and health codes.

... The new space 'will be organized, beautiful, and largely inside, hidden from the prying eyes of nosey neighbors and nettlesome bureaucrats.'"

(http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2015-03/shipping-container-hom...)

arikr
While on the topic, does anyone else know of other cool things like this? Cool space. e.g. http://www.blokable.com/
liseman
More oriented to multi-unit, permanent builds: https://www.montainerhomes.com/ High-end, semi-stackable: http://kasita.com My favorite ultra-low-cost builder: http://relaxshacks.blogspot.com/ My favorite youtuber for sustainability broadly, with a focus on housing: https://www.youtube.com/user/kirstendirksen
austenallred
What do you think happens to pricing at scale?
liseman
Eventually, we'll make tiny homes as affordable as other factory-built products: car prices, if not cheaper.
Matt_stove
How does that work, ad your main component, a shipping container, doesn't really scale much?
liseman
At thousands of units per month, we're probably off of shipping containers and onto something lighter and cheaper:)
elmar
Building a wood structure with the same size of a container would cost more than the $2,000 price of the container?
ajb
Isn't it noisy when it rains? (It rains a lot here).
liseman
We use several inches of closed-cell foam insulation interior to the metal. In addition to an r-value of 15+, you're not hearing much outside:)
whalesalad
R15 feels a little low? Here in Michigan, for example, the ceiling requires R49. Walls require at least R20.
patrickg_zill
For one thing it is a smaller space, easily heated and cooled. Second, closed cell foam means no air infiltration to suck away your heat.

Walls in houses, assuming stud framed, are insulated to R20 but effective R value is less due to thermal bridging, air infiltration.

sly010
Is there a tiny housing bubble?
n-exploit
I love the idea, but as-is, I think your product could more attractive if you hired an interior designer to help with the sample pictures/overall product "image".

Attractive product, unattractive design. There's nothing there to make me want your product over another company doing the same thing with more emphasis on design.

hastewart39
I totally agree. We have two upcoming units which were designed by an artist and interior designer. The great thing about tiny homes and fast production is that we can iterate through design ideas really quickly. In the coming month we're going to put a big focus on aesthetic and interaction design.
liseman
Here's some photos of work in progress: https://goo.gl/photos/N6jiAo9696QJG6KU8
n-exploit
Honestly, there is still nothing here that compels me to buy your product. Who is your target audience? What's your appeal? What makes your product special?

I am a mid-twenties millennial looking for a starter home (considering a container home) and I'm not really seeing something I want.

conductr
I've followed this space for years now. The problem I see is, at these prices, someone like n-exploit can hire a custom builder to do it exactly to their tastes/layout.

I'm not seeing what benefit do you add to the existing ecosystem?

liseman
I will be absolutely stunned if you can get a tiny home custom-built with a solar system half this size for less than 80k.
conductr
The Deluxe priced at $49k is very basic finish that could be replicated for $30k max, potentially much cheaper. So does a 1kW solar system bridge the price gap? Not even close

The reason you anchor on that 80k number is because custom building usually has a lot extra. Better quality. High cost materials. More carpentry. This is basically a plywood box and a solar system. And a solar system of this size is only a few grand installed.

prawn
Here's the aesthetic you need to aim for to stand out: https://getaway.house/annabelle/

Get a designer in your team ASAP IMO as I think the styling is going to seriously hamper you in the short term otherwise.

dluan
I have a friend who tried this and found that he had to take a crane operating class just so he could move/transport the shipping container.

It's kind of cool to think that you could live anywhere in the world that has an open port, but how the heck do you get it off a boat in Chile or Ireland the same that's cheap and freeing?

hastewart39
A few years ago we shipped a fab shop complete with a plasma cnc from Texas to a farm in rural Kenya, the whole process was surprisingly easy and I discovered that farm life is way more fun with a plasma cnc!
dluan
It'd be really cool to send around a science lab like this. If you need any traveling scientists to live in a boxlab for a trial run, let me know.
hourislate
There are special trucks set up to deliver 20ft/40ft containers anywhere. Since a large portion of goods flows by water you should not have a problem at any port in the world to load and unload your container.

The fee to deliver your container to it's final destination can be from a couple of hundred dollars and up depending on how far the truck driver has to go from the logistics company.

Logistically you can ship a 40 ft container (max weight) from China to Toronto Canada (delivered to premises) for $2000-2800.

You do not need to have a crane operators license or class.

cpeterso
The boxouse.com website is quite frustrating. I scrolled down the page to view the pictures of the houses, but when each picture scrolls into view, it is obscured by a white overlay?! Readers must click each picture to view it on a new page.
throwanem
I was about to raise the same issue. Not really a satisfactory UX when the photos that might give me some idea of what I'm looking at are obscured whenever they're in the browser viewport.
beaconstudios
I really don't understand the appeal of this. Are people really so desperate to live in an expensive city that they'd be willing to live in a box?

Also, how do you plan to get away from the image of metal box houses being tied to shanty-towns and favelas?

setr
>Are people really so desperate to live in an expensive city that they'd be willing to live in a box?

Isn't near every apt just a box, with slight changes around the frame? The question is how you carve up space within the box

throwanem
Topologically, yes. Semiotically, no.
dragonwriter
> Are people really so desperate to live in an expensive city that they'd be willing to live in a box?

Certainly, but the thing with expensive cities is that the hard part of that is finding the space and meeting the legal requirements, not getting the box.

That's also the problem in suburbs (though the space problem might be a little easier, legal requirements are at least as much of an issue.)

i_am_andy
Yes I suspect they are. Rents are incredibly high in major cities. Having seen the size (&cost) of the rooms available for rent in london these containers look quite reasonable.

In the west we don't have favelas so while I think it would be a down-point, I don't think there would be such a strong negative connotation.

beaconstudios
we don't, but the image of favelas is pretty pervasive in popular culture eg movies.
ph0rque
Hi Luke! What is your initial market, and what are your scaling plans?
liseman
Hi Andrew! Initial focus is the Bay Area, where rents are particularly absurd. Unlike other tiny homes, we can stack these to scale existing locations to meet demand (with some zoning hurdles, of course)
ph0rque
Good luck! May your weekly growth be 10% or larger :)
blhack
Have you guys looked into providing these for industrial sites or the military?
ceejayoz
https://boxouse.com/collections/buy/products/boxouse-standar...

Those photos don't really fit the "sleek finish out" and "premium materials" description. The tub looks dirty, the bed slats are all wonky, and it looks overall extremely cheap.

It's certainly not $20k worth of add-ons to the barebones bit (https://boxouse.com/collections/buy/products/boxouse-barebon...).

ashark
Yeah, this looks less appealing than a single-wide. Since the real value in these not-mobile-home small housing thingies usually seems to be letting people live in a mobile home without compromising their sense of where they sit in the class structure, it needs to at least have a veneer of "superb craftsmanship" or whatever.
throwanem
It really does. Based on these photos, I'd rather live in a single-wide, and I know from experience exactly how shoddy those are.
shriphani
There was a shipping container home on Grand Designs (what a show!) that looked absolutely breathtaking: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/09/24/1411571780563_wps_...

I think a bit of sprucing up (with wood and a sound paint-job) would go a long way to remove that whiff of trailer park that I get from your landing page.

ttam
how come it took so long to "launch"? I recall seeing you working on this in 2015?
liseman
This was firmly a hobby until a few months ago, at which point I quit my job to focus on boxouse full-time.
willholloway
It's very inspiring that you were able to build out an idea like this on a hobby level and get it into YC.

Don't let the negativity in this thread get you down. You will work out all the problems listed in this thread, and zoning change is on the horizon all across the country.

There is a real need for housing like this. Pre-fab housing is a proven model, my father developed modular home projects starting in the '80s and swears by them.

If you ever have been on a stick built job site and have gotten to know the workers well socially, you can see the advantage of indoor, factory precise, standardized construction that is supervised.

There is a lot of substance abuse, laziness and the contractor relationship and payment structure very often goes south in home construction.

I think the best decision you could make today is to ditch the shipping container as the starting point.

Just build them out of wood. It's the cheapest material there is besides some composites perhaps. You already are building a wood framed wall inside the metal container. They could still be made the same size, and shipped the same way.

sarcher
I agree, building them out of wood will allow much lower frame costs and greater design control.
billmalarky
I was under the impression zoning regulation, not construction costs, was the main challenge for development in urban areas.

Can you seriously just drop these off in people's backyards and legally rent them out?

brudgers
There's more than local zoning at play. There are health regulations regarding potable water and sanitary waste disposal for dwellings that occur at the state level. There's ADA and FHA at the Federal Level.

Also at the local level are things like occupational taxes and building permits. Unlike room and whole house rental, a container provides direct visible evidence of the activity from the air, over a neighbor's fence, or sometimes from the street.

abakker
Short summation: No way. Living in shipping containers is not a great idea. By the time you overcome all the hurdles, you realize the envelope is smallest cost of housing development.
accountface
Wood framing, especially for a small single-level structure, is the de-facto in the US for a reason.
brudgers
It's not so much that it the lowest cost, it is that there are fixed costs that correlate to 'per dwelling unit'. Some of those are monetary, e.g. digging a trench for a sanitary sewer is pretty much the same for a tiny house as a McMansion. But the amount of effort is also mostly constant: getting permits and other entitlement for a four unit project is not that much less than getting entitlement for a forty unit project (and forty high end units are likely to require less work during entitlement than forty low end units because the high end units tend to be more politically palatable because they better improve the tax base).
howderek
These prices seem too high. Low-end mobile homes are around the same price, are larger, offer nicer interiors, and face fewer legal complexities. I also know tiny home builders who can custom build homes with similar square footage as these for around the same price. I live in Missouri so housing is cheap, but isn't the advantage of pre-fab homes the ability to ship them for a much lower cost than building on-site?

I don't see how this could scale past cities where rent is insane and have housing regulations that allow this kind of home.

What is the advantage of this versus other pre-fabricated homes? What justifies the price?

Veratyr
I agree. Not only can you get low-end mobile homes or build a tiny home but in much of the world you can get a reasonable apartment.
liseman
We'll make it clearer on the website, but the 49k version includes a 1.5kw solar array, ~15kwh of battery storage, all water systems, full smart home functionality (ie 'alexa, trigger windows' to go from transparent to opaque), and furnishings down to the utensils. Our 9k barebones model is closer to how most mobile homes I've seen are outfitted (but with better insulation and design in a boxouse); looks like these average over 60k new: http://www.dailyyonder.com/manufactured-housing-sales-bounce... . am i missing something?
elmar
Hi Luke, Thanks for taking the time to talk with us and your efforts on tackling the housing problems.

One question, is the main focus of the business to manufacture and sell the Box houses or offer then for renting with AirBnB or similar sites? If the latter do you have some planed strategy to lower the high CAPEX needed for scaling?

liseman
Both, balancing the capex needs for the latter via sales as I scale:)
alexhutcheson
Does the 49k version have a toilet?
liseman
Yes: toilet, shower, water heater, kitchen sink.
nojvek
That's pretty epic to have a fully functional human nest for 49k.

Is there a place where I can try them out. I will be visiting SF and definitely want to experience staying in a container home before deciding to make a call.

A dream of mine is to buy some land in a remote place with a gorgeous view and place a container home there.

xbeta
Are you hiring any software engineer? :-p
rootedbox
Not trying to be a hater. I understand what is pictured may be prototypes.. if they are you shouldn't be showing them unless you have that caveat in the picture. Both the design is poor, and the craftsmanship is low. If this is past the prototype stage, and this is what you will actually be selling. Then you really don't understand the pre-fab space nor the price points of the pre-fab space.
liseman
thanks for the feedback. what are the most compelling prefabs you've found that are actually shipping, and how much do they cost?
sarcher
Prefab is a loaded term - unfortunately, depending on people's experiences, it can be loaded in very different ways.

At YC, there's Acre (Pacific NW, California, Colorado): http://www.acredesigns.com/

I work with BrightBuilt (New England originally, now shipping in the mid-Atlantic as well): http://brightbuilthome.com/

Up here in Maine we also have Ecocor, which is a panel product: https://www.ecocor.us/

I think those are a couple of good prefab examples, although none of them hang their designs on the shipping container form factor (and I specifically picked three 'prefab' companies with very different delivery methods). Most prefab companies I have experience with have gone that way, primarily because the width constraints of a container aren't great once you get above one or two modules.

I think the branding (or rebranding) of small homes built on tow-able platforms as 'tiny homes' was a genius stroke of marketing. If you can do that with the Boxouse that's some secret sauce, but in the absence of a strong brand I think the Boxouse units will end up being called 'trailers' as opposed to 'prefab'.

brudgers
Does Boxhouse handle acquiring potable water and sanitary sewer on behalf of the owner?
liseman
Yes. Depending on the location and length of time the boxouse will be there, we can do off-grid (tanks monitored and filled/pumped as need, RV-style) or grid-connected (linked to existing house's plumbing)
brudgers
Does Boxhouse absorb the costs of permitting and construction for homeowners? What sort of duration is necessary?
liseman
We're going to do this selectively: getting the first ADU design fully licensed in a given MSA is going to be important for us. We'll want to see a year+ commitment to justify the cost.
xbeta
Are you hiring any SWE ? :-p
abakker
How to you ameliorate the toxins inherent in shipping containers? Typically, those paints and pressure treated woods are not used indoors, and I would be worried about some of the chemicals? Second, in the climate here, how do you avoid mold? Metal is a prime target for condensation, and in the bay we are always around the dew point. If you insulate the walls, how do you avoid mold growth (maybe put insulation on the outside)? How about power/gas supply, HVAC, waste plumbing etc? How about moving it? Leveling it? it seems that they'll be substantially heavier than most mobile homes, so trailering with consumer vehicles will be hard, which makes them hard to deliver.

I've been in shipping container buildings before (e.g. Frietag store in Zurich) - they are not really a great size. Many Mobile homes that are comfortable feature pop-out sides. Any plans for expanding them?

Some real positives - fireproof envelope, Envelope can be welded to, several formats available - including ones with side doors can be "racked" can be made airtight (allows you to specify air exchanges, rather than estimate them) portability with the right equipment.

liseman
The interior environment gets entirely sealed under closed-cell foam insulation applied directly to the metal, leaving no interior space for condensation on the metal. Literally all surfaces that you're exposed to are things we buy at home improvement stores: bamboo flooring, cabinet-grade plywood, etc. A big part of the 'deluxe' cost is the elaborate solar system: we're able to cook, heat space + water, etc. all off of the solar array + batteries. We're thinking about possibilities for pop-outs in the future.
abakker
Please see: http://www.archdaily.com/160892/the-pros-and-cons-of-cargo-c...

"For instance, the coatings used to make the containers durable for ocean transport also happen to contain a number of harmful chemicals, such as chromate, phosphorous, and lead-based paints. Moreover, wood floors that line the majority of shipping container buildings are infused with hazardous chemical pesticides like arsenic and chromium to keep pests away."

and

"Reusing Containers seems to be a low energy alternative, however, few people factor in the amount of energy required to make the box habitable. The entire structure needs to be sandblasted bare, floors need to be replaced, and openings need to be cut with a torch or fireman’s saw. The average container eventually produces nearly a thousand pounds of hazardous waste before it can be used as a structure."

patcheudor
This! I've looked seriously into making a large shipping crate home by slowly accumulating them for storage and whatnot at my farm. Ultimately, after learning about the hazardous materials used in many, I gave up. Besides the points mentioned by abakker, one of the things that really got to me was the 'mystery box' aspect. Simply put, you don't know what they carried or what got spilled inside. Was it carrying pesticides? Did a bunch of compact florescence break inside in a storm releasing mercury into the container? There have even been reports of shipping containers which are radioactive above background levels, presumably from spilled nuclear medical waste or shipping something like Uranium ore. Before you call me nuts:

"About 20 million consignments of all sizes containing radioactive materials are routinely transported worldwide annually on public roads, railways and ships."

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

Note that sprayed on closed cell insulation does little to nothing to mitigate many of the toxins which can be found in shipping containers including mercury - it just makes it poisonous for longer. To use them for a dwelling all wood needs to be removed and they need to be sand or water blasted down to bare metal.

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dmvaldman
Any plans to be able to use these modularly and combine several shipping containers?
liseman
for permanent installs, I really like the idea of containers as side supports to a quonset hut. like this, but with 3-4 containers: http://alarconbohm.com/