Architects are recasting the assumptions of manufactured housing construction with designs that make a positive solution out of America’s trade deficit.

Say again, how is that?

Increasingly, the U.S. imports more goods than it send back overseas.  While oil tankers are too expensive to discard, many of the shipping containers are left in US ports.  These uniform steel boxes (either forty feet by 8 1/2, or 20 by 8 1/2 feet) that once held plasma screen televisions or melamine-laced milk are now idled, waiting for a return shipment order.  While the cartons are not actually thrown away, the paucity of outgoing shipments insures that there is a geographical imbalance, with the surplus in the US.

Enter some creative architects, many of whom are working on the West Coast.  Patrick Tozier of Global Living Systems is designing homes in Hawaiian subdivisions.  The goal is to make an affordable house.  Tozier can provide clients with a 2000 square foot house, fashioned from sections of four shipping containers.  The homes are insulated with ceramic paint.

A Tozier home destined for a subdivision lot in Puna, Hawaii

Hawaii is home to a number of other participants in this market, from Containers Hawaii to Green Island Builders.  Although the cost-efficiencies are attractive, permitting and perceptual issues are still hurdles, they say.

The steel structure adds a lot of strength to the building.

In California, some designers are stacking the homes.  Demaria Designs, in Redondo Beach, is not far from a steady supply of shipping containers at the Long Beach Port.  This is a beatiful home that expands on the clean lines of containers to project a feeling of modernity and security.  The homes are filled with light and glass.  This design won an award from the American Institute of Architects.

What if manufactured housing had taken a different path?  It is an important question.  It can be hard to get people past their negative thoughts about some issues with manufactured housing – with Katrina Trailers, with “trailer parks,” with homes that are underwater.

Yet a lot of innovative architectural energy has sought to apply the power of industrial production with the human shelter.

Today I would like to consider one of those efforts – the Archimede System.  The Archimede System uses rhombododecahedrons. A home is often built from between 30 and 60 panels.

The homes were built with the intent of providing affordable housing.  For this reason, they were built with the idea of putting a car in the physical space below the structure itself.  The design saves land, reduces the likelihood of robbery, and allows wind drafts to pass under the home (saving on heating costs).

An Archimede System home. Parking is below.

Perhaps this is not a suprising event, in the era of beach housing on stilts near shorelines, but at the time (70s), building homes up in the air was not standard practice.  That is why the builders were surprised to discover that the homes had a special talent.  They survived very rough weather – hurricanes, tsunamis, and high winds.

The homes are made of concrete.  This gives the homes a bit of a Metabolist reference.  More practically, it adds purpose to homes that are used in high moisture, high parasite environments.

Here is a aerial view of a series of interconnected Archimede homes in St. Maarten’s, the Guana Bay Archimede Village.

Now the homes are being used for shelter in the Artic.

Coachmen is selling its recreational vehicle business to Forest River.

The particulars of the deal are not yet available, but the sale has been reported in the Wall Street Journal today.

Coachmen CEO Richard Lavers laments that this is “the worst economic crisis our country has endured in our lifetimes.:”

Housing sales at Coachmen are only off 4 percent, but sales of RV’s have fallen more than 50 percent.

Forest River is owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of housing strategies that seek to improve places is that sometimes residents are displaced.

Many housing and economic development strategies put places before people.  It may not be intentional, but some plans have led to displacement over and over again.  While the issue of displacement has been well documented in older housing developments, it is also going on in our manufactured housing communities.

Hope VI was one of the more recent, and controversial, housing interventions to create a wave of displacement.  Hope VI sought to replace the tired and dysfunctional housing developments erected after World War II throughout the country.  That plan was implemented through the creation of new housing developments that mixed low-income residents with market-rate homes.

The idea was laudable — let’s not warehouse the poor in concentrated ghettos, where substandard housing (more…)

As Obama prepares to redefine how America is governed, some have been asking how the new Department of Housing and Urban Development should be defined.

HUD itself is an organization with multiple commitments – to prevent poverty, to provide shelter.  It appears to be concerned with cities, yet it oversees the most rural of all housing elements – the manufactured home.

One provocative idea is to eliminate HUD altogether.  The author’s logic is that the unstated purpose of HUD is to gentrify the urban core, and that this goal is misguided.

There are other well-known issues with HUD.  Not the least of these are crises in recent years with corruption.

If HUD was shuttered, then presumably new institutions would be created to respond to the multiple endeavors that HUD pursues.  This might include an office for urban planning, another for poverty, and another for Housing.

The regulation and management of manufactured housing could fit into the Housing section.

Obama’s urban background suggests that his approach to HUD could be different than just about any other US President in the last 100 years.  There is no recent example of a President who was such a city dweller.  While some have come from suburbs (Nixon, Reagan, Hoover), others have favored a rural background (Carter, Bush II, LBJ), a small town (Eisenhower, Truman), or a vacation environ (Bush I, Kennedy).