The plan to build micro-apartments taps into a handful of converging trends, including the “housing first” approach to alleviating homelessness, which prioritizes providing permanent housing ahead of other services. That movement, in turn, has led advocates to light on the idea of tiny homes as a way of providing cheap, decent housing to a larger number of people. It has gained traction in Dallas, Detroit, and Portland, Ore., among other cities.
The notion of repurposing shipping containers as cheap, very small apartments has also attracted attention. The San Francisco-based real estate developer Panoramic Interests has been touting a plan to retrofit the steel containers as stackable pod apartments, while sky-high Bay Area rents have created a new class of landlords letting out communal living spaces, including a warehouse filled with shipping containers.
Mock-ups presented to the Santa Clara City Council showed the apartments constructed out of shipping containers. Sobrato said they could also be built out of another modular system, or by traditional, ground-up construction.
It’s still early days for the housing project. Sobrato’s appearance before the Santa Clara City Council was in support of his request for an exclusive negotiation for a ground lease on the property; the Council granted that by unanimous vote. Beyond that approval, the developer asked for support for the project in the face of community opposition, a problem that has roiled plans to build homeless shelters and low-income housing from New York to Los Angeles.
“I expect that the Council will hear from somebody in the neighborhood. There’s always some Nimby that you’re going to hear from that’s going to object to the project,” he told the Council at the Dec. 6 meeting, referring to Not In My Back Yard. “We want to make sure that at the end of the day you’re going to be there for us.”
Gillmor, the mayor, said that even if the city agreed to the lease, the project would need to go through the approval process that governs all new construction. Still, she offered qualified support.
“Right now we’re housing cars on the property. That's a waste,” Gillmor said. “I think we should look at housing people."
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.