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When I got married a few years ago, we made our typical vows but my bride also made me promise that we would never live in a portable storage container.  That was tough.  I mean, come on, they’re sturdy, cheap, and spacious - 320 sq. ft. in a 40′ shipping container. You add four of them together and you’ve got a home that’s bigger than most of the homes in Central Austin.  Needless to say, I was not successful in persuading her.

Yesterday, this article hit CNN - Shipping containers could be ‘dream’ homes for thousands.  These guys in New Mexico have found a low cost, environmentally friendly housing solution for the exploding population in Juarez.  These container homes can be mass produced, easily setup, and are built from recycled shipping containers. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.  

In the past couple of years, we’ve been building prototypes in Austin, and the same concept of container homes could be applied to areas like Laredo, or even Galveston.  If you check out the website for PFNC Global Communities, you’ll see that they even have ideas for a multi-family development.  I love the creativity - used shipping containers into something usable.

So now the question is whether or not I try to revisit the idea of living in a portable storage container with my wife…

Jen and I took a trip up to the Pacific Northwest last week. Living in Austin, you see shipping containers primarily in transit - either on trains or being hauled by trucks. When you visit port cities like Vancouver or Seattle, you see these massive container ships coming into port, the cranes that they use to pull them off the boat and the depots that hold all the containers. The volume of shipping containers is truly amazing.  Mark Levinson even writes about the dramatic impact of shipping containers in his book “The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger“.

With natural trade imbalances, where would all these shipping containers go?  You can’t just throw them away.  The portable storage container industry is part of this ecosystem, recycling the retired shipping containers and finding a new use for them.   We’ve been “green” all this time, even before “green” was cool.  Who would’ve thought?  People will find more and more uses for retired shipping containers. My hope is that  Falcon Storage will be at the forefront of that innovation, figuring out what’s beyond portable storage.  If anything, I’m happy to know that we are helping with the whole green initiative.