A shipping container is 320 square feet. Two pods can be joined into a single 740 square foot unit. That's a total cost of $80,000. Let's round to $100,000. Assume a rental yield of 12%.

$1000 a month for a brand new 740 square foot apartment in the middle of San Francisco. Plus with modern finishes that are frankly much nicer than anything you'll find in the low-end SF rental market. I'd imagine quite a lot of people would sign up.

I don't think shipping container housing is the panacea the marketing makes it out to be. The savings aren't as crazy as you might think because of all the retrofitting involved to make them pleasant for human occupancy. Square feet are a nice shorthand for certain aspects of habitability, but floor area is not the only relevant factor.

This is mostly from an NYT article, so perhaps it's just one school if thought among many, but I found it convincing on the merits. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/opinion/shipping-containe...

That seems like a lot of money compared to existing prefab options. For the same or less money, why not use something designed to be a dwelling to begin with?

Why do you think construction price, and not land price, is the limiting factor?

I'm in a high-demand city in Canada. The house I'm in right now is worth about $70k. The land it sits on is worth $900k. Shipping containers aren't going to help with that.

It will if you stack them eight stories high.

Don't know where you live, but I doubt it's more expensive land than San Francisco, where the average acre of land costs $3.2 million[1]. Taking that acre of land, save half the area for green-space and courtyard. Use half the footprint for shipping containers. Stack the containers 8 high.

You now have 242 double-pod units. The amortized land cost per unit is $13,000. Assuming a generous rental yield of 12%, the land cost only adds $130 a month to the rent. That's hardly anything for a 720 square foot apartment.

The lesson is that even San Francisco land costs are no match for the power of high-rise high-density housing.

[1] https://www.6sqft.com/study-shows-huge-disparity-in-u-s-urba...

Same ballpark ($2-3 million/acre) - and yeah, you're not wrong that if you can get approval for 250 units in an acre you can have reasonably priced housing. But the hard part in that equation is convincing whoever controls zoning to allow for it - once you do that, whether it's shipping containers or traditional construction you can have affordable housing.

I know many people who would rather live in a shipping container than where they're currently living.

Well, in Amsterdam students:

https://www.studenten.net/artikel/wonen-in-een-container

The kind of people who move to San Francisco from new york or connecticut, or wherever, to get rich then immediately start complaining that San Francisco isn't like wherever it is they immigrated from.