According to treehugger.com (I know, I know), there are a couple of downsides to using shipping containers as homes. They are not easily insulated (a problem here in the summer, as we know), they don’t work in stacks unless you put them in specific places (which many DIYers may not know), and they are not the most efficient use of the steel that would otherwise get stretched farther if purpose-made to build homes. “There is a lot more steel in a shipping container than you actually need for a building; that’s so they can be stacked full nine high, get tossed around on the ocean and thrown on trucks and trains,” says Lloyd Alter, who wrote the article on storage containers for treehugger.com, “It’s really being wasted when it’s put into a house. And as Mark (an engineer whose notes Lloyd cribbed off (like I’m cribbing and attributing to Lloyd), you can probably build it faster and cheaper than bringing in a welder and mucking up a shipping container.”

But, in the places where they are in use – the owners swear by them. A story from KVUE in Austin discusses the benefits of building with storage containers in the Texas town of Bastrop. “[the owner] said the they used to stay in a trailer [when they visited their land in the area] but found that contianers were safer, more sustainable in the weather, kept rodents out and were an afforable option,” Conner Board reported in the article for the Austin-based television station. 

A principal architect at a design firm in San Francisco says there is nothing wrong with using shipping containers for buildings – provided they are used correctly. In a blog post he originally put up himself but now only exists on Arch Daily, he writes: “For a temporary facility, where the owner desires a shipping container aesthetic, they can be a good fit. (look, I’ve even done a container project!). For sites where on-site construction is not feasible or desirable, fitting a container out in the factory can be a sensible option, even though you’ll still have to do things like pour foundations. It probably won’t save you any money over conventional construction (and very well might cost more), but it can solve some other problems. The place where containers really don’t make any sense is housing. I know you’ve seen all the proposals, often done with a humanitarian angle (building slum housing, housing for refugees, etc) that promise a factory-built “solution” to the housing “problem” but often positioned as a luxury product as well.”

The Architect, Mark Hogan, then lists why he thinks they are not a solution to mass or affordable housing.