Hipsters Need Tiny Houses, Too

Tiny houses have many a function in modern society. They can reduce our impact on the environment, transform a single-family property into a multifamily one, house the homeless, and fulfill our desire for adorableness.

Also: They can provide homes to those starry-eyed millennials flocking to job-filled cities where they’d have to crowd 10 to an apartment to afford a place on a starter salary. (Unless their first job is as a highly paid tech employee, in which case they’d probably need only two or three roommates.)

According to the New York Times, hipsters priced out of San Francisco have flocked to an industrial neighborhood of Oakland, “where the rates are increasing as well—so much so that young professionals are living in repurposed shipping containers while the homeless are lugging around coffinlike sleeping boxes on wheels.”

In fact, the younger set is living in “Containertopia,” “a village of 160-square-foot shipping containers like ones used in the Port of Oakland. Each resident pays $600 a month to live in a container, which can be modified with things like insulation, glass doors, electrical outlets, solar panels and a self-contained shower and toilet.”

That beats the average rent in San Francisco, $5,856. The median rent in the neighborhood around Containertopia has risen 20% in the past year, the Times reported.

But the land on which Containertopia originally sat still had to be purchased. Its founders, Luke Iseman and Heather Stewart, bought an abandoned lot with friends for $425,000, though they were forced out of the lot—it wasn’t zoned for residential development—this spring. Then they moved the community inside a warehouse. Meanwhile, renters need to cough up some dough to make the containers into homes; Iseman spent around $12,000 on his.

Containertopia isn’t the only container community in that spot. An artist named Gregory Kloehn makes container houses on wheels, using recycled materials, which he gives away to the homeless in the area. But those individuals likely can’t invest thousands of dollars to craft a cool-looking home. In a way, the two communities exemplify the situation in the San Francisco Bay Area: the tech millennials versus the homeless (and the middle and working classes, too).

Yet the Containertopia founders see their example as a potential panacea to housing shortages everywhere. “If we can do it in one of the highest-cost places in the world,” Iseman told the Times, “people can do this anywhere.”

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