“Feel it, that’s solid steel, that’s not going anywhere,” says Nick Foster, the exhilarated businessman building Windsor’s first shipping container home.

Fireproof, water tight, sturdy, functional — these “10,000-pound Legos” have the potential to solve the city’s affordable housing crisis, says Foster, who envisions a factory crew producing near-finished housing units at a rate of one every four days. A single container is typically 40-by-eight feet — 320 square feet.

The structure Foster is building on a 35-foot-wide vacant lot in the 200 block of Curry Avenue has eight of these containers welded together and mounted on steel girders sunk into the ground that together are capable of holding 600,000 pounds. Spaces are cut out in the steel to accommodate 16-foot-wide rooms, windows and additions at the side for staircases.

This will be a two-storey duplex with two 1,400-square foot units, each with three bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, insulation, balconies and lots of luxuries like walk-in closets. It will be clad with siding and topped with solar panels and a green roof growing plants.

“I wanted to make it look big and grandiose for the first one, to make people see it’s not just a box,” said Foster, a real estate broker who grew up in Windsor but now resides in Port Stanley. His personal plan is to go to law school here in a year or two, living in the back unit and renting out the front.

He’s spent almost $200,000 so far, not including the land, and still has a ways to go. He hopes to finish by the end of the year if he can scrape the money together. Though his project has been costly and time-consuming (he started four years ago), with myriad delays, he said he’s done all the “heavy lifting” on the prototype. If these units were mass-produced, the cost would drop dramatically, he said.

A former Fabco worker, he said he believes Windsor’s manufacturing background makes this area a perfect place to start turning these containers — costing $2,000 to $4,000 each — into low-cost housing. He’s looking for an “angel investor,” to help him get the enterprise going.

Adding up all the costs (shipping, hiring a crane, a base, welding and cutting, flooring, heating and AC, electrical, plumbing, kitchen, lumber, drywall, and a bathroom) including labour, he estimates you could build a nice basic 320-square-foot unit for around $50,000. That’s significantly less than what small condos are going for these days. Foster believes there are plenty of vacant lots throughout the core areas of the city where these homes could be located.

“We don’t need $2-million LaSalle homes, we need $100,000 homes,” he said. “Since when is housing a privilege?”

Repurposing shipping containers has been growing in popularity in recent years, with eye-popping conversions to swimming pools, restaurants and of course housing. But they’ve been slow to take hold locally. The first local project — using 10 containers to build a lakefront beach house in Stoney Point — started more than a year ago but has been delayed by a number of setbacks including having trouble finding workers during the current building boom. Owner Sandor Abri said he’s been doing most of the work himself and probably won’t be finished until early next summer. But he’s still a big believer in building with shipping containers.

“I love it,” he said. “It’s a challenge every day, but I love it.”

Foster’s is the first project of its kind in Windsor, where shipping containers aren’t permitted in residential areas. The city issued a building permit a year ago, but not before requiring an engineer’s seal on the project to ensure that modifying steel shipping containers — by cutting them and sticking them together — would not destroy their integrity. Deputy chief building official Joe Baker said the city considers Foster’s work a pilot project, to help guide future rules about these types of homes.

“We don’t necessarily want to see shipping containers show up on properties that don’t have the look and feel of residential type of development,” said Baker, who said the project met all building code requirements.

“We’re kind of all keeping an eye on it to see how we’re going to move this forward.”

The issuance of the permit last November was a watershed moment for Foster after several years of delays. He first got the idea after a trip to Nova Scotia where he saw dockyards with thousands of these containers, surplus after years at sea, stacked eight high. The eight containers arrived a few weeks ago at the Curry Avenue site, where they were hoisted by crane and welded together and onto the steel base. Ever since, there have been eight or nine people every day stopping by to ask about a shipping container home of their own, said Foster.

“You picture something and you keep plugging away at it and it becomes a reality.”

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