> So an academic doesn't like reusing industrial machinery for living in. Does he also hate rowhomes? Tokyo apartments? College dorm rooms? A Manhattan studio?

This isn't an academic's whim. Shipping containers are not designed or adequate for residential use. This does not change if you enumerate other examples of awful living conditions.

Nothing about a shipping container is particularly inadequate for residential use. It's an empty box, exactly like the empty shell of a stick-built American house. You wouldn't live inside a stick frame house just because it has four sides, you have to keep building onto and into it until it's done.

Wood and metal have very different properties with regards to insulation, weather, what it feels like to sit/lean on them, the psychological effects of being in a room made of one for an extended period of time, etc ...

Plus I would wonder what, if any coatings were on the shipping containers, and if they were toxic, and do they degrade over time.

Plus wood is significantly easier to work with.

I'll also throw in the fact that even for some reason you wanted metal, we've also solved the 'make a metal building wherever you want it' fairly well too. It is designed for adding doors, windows, comes in a kit form, and also breathes and can be insulated to have pleasant thermal properties. Even just in $/sqft having rechecked on this idea the price was never so much better than other kinds of buildings that are more suited to be in livable spaces.

Really what I would have wanted to see is people handling disposal of containers and then using the broken down materials to build a structure and/or just being smarter about reclaiming the material, but I haven't seen that come up in passively looking into it.

I think the issue is that people don't trust themselves to build a wooden box with adequate structural integrity.

Shipping containers on the other hand are cheap, easily available and proven.

> I think the issue is that people don't trust themselves to build a wooden box with adequate structural integrity.

Why is that a concern? There are plenty of people who are more than capable of designing and constructing buildings. Even if you need to pay for their expertise, their work costs a fraction of the total building cost.

Exactly like, except for the lack of windows and insulation? Obviously those can be added, but it takes a plasma torch, not a hammer and a saw, unlike traditional building materials.

Also, shipping containers have a lot in common with soda cans: they have been engineered to have adequate physical characteristics within the very constrained parameters they are expected to operate under, and once they are outside that box, well, they're as fragile as soda cans.

For instance, if you try to stack your shipping containers any way but "directly square on top of each other, bordered by other shipping containers", you need to start over from scratch. All of those fancy stacks with one container crossing or bridging another come with lots of additional structural engineering to create the impression of whimsy. Or if you cut a big hole in one side of a shipping container to create a nice big picture window, whoops, you've destroyed the integrity of the container. Or you try to stack too much weight in the center of the top of the container, and no, that doesn't work either because the weight is supposed to be transmitted through the corners and sides.

You can both insulate shipping containers and cut windows into them.

> You can both insulate shipping containers and cut windows into them.

You can do that to anything, even cardboard boxes taken out of the dumpster. That doesn't mean they are adequate living spaces.

You don't need a plasma cutter. If you're patient and noise-tolerant, an angle grinder, reciprocating saw, or even a circular saw (with proper blades) will do the job.

If you do want to use a plasma cutter (which I admit would be a more pleasant way of doing the job), you can rent a good one for a couple of hundred bucks a week, or buy a crap one at Lowes or Home Depot for $200-300.

I prefer to think of it as “carbon sequestering” rather than “stick built.”

> And they can be stacked, creating multiple floors without any extra engineering.

Unless you want windows, or a staircase between your floors... Now you're cutting holes in the thing and you've lost your stackability guarantee. Better call the engineer after all.

You are missing the fact that shipping containers are built for shipping and are reusable. They are not things that we have a surplus of and are abandoned, with no use. If you want to use a container that is not adequate for shipping to live in, you are crazy. If you take a good one out of the shipping pool, this means a brand new one will be built as replacement. At no point in a shipping container life it is good for the environment.

Arguing that shipping containers are the solution for the housing problem is like arguing frozen steaks are the best way to get a patient temperature down.