Shipping Containers Repurposed into Plug-In Pods for Social Good
With Urban rentals on the rise and low-income earner's wages remaining mostly sluggish, Wanona Satcher - an urban designer, landscape architect, and city planner - has been working for years to find a reasonable, realistic solution to the affordable housing challenge troubling cities across the country.
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The Vision
Wanona Satcher started ReJuve, an Atlanta-based non-profit urban design firm. ReJuve’s mission is to tackle the affordable housing crisis by recycling and repurposing old shipping containers and transforming them into residential and commercial dwellings for low-income families, small businesses, and small start-up companies.
328K
New Apartments Needed Annually
According to a study commissioned by the National Apartment Association (NAA) and National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) and conducted by Hoyt Advisory Services (HAS), the United States needs to build 328,000 new apartment homes each year to meet the growing demand. And with the price of office rentals going up in cities across the U.S., small business owners are in need of an alternative.
Satcher originally began studying how to push sustainable urban development when she was a city employee at the Durham Urban Innovation Center in Durham, North Carolina. Part of her job was to help develop neighborhood revitalization strategies, including turning damaged or abandoned properties into community spaces.
She began a mission to figure out how to involve communities in the rehabilitating properties process. As she worked through the thinking process, she started looking at the idea of re-using shipping containers because of their mobility, easy access, availability, and affordability. Also, she discovered they were small enough to rehab and modify.
The Vision Takes Flight
The Plug-In-Pod idea — a rehabilitated shipping container that has been equipped with plumbing and electricity, was launched. Promoting the concept of “social good”, Plug-In-Pods provide individual shipping container houses that are adapted for uses such as micro commercial businesses, community centers and affordable at-home living spaces.
Plug-in-Pods can be office and entrepreneurial space for small businesses. They can be used to create areas and communities that are reasonable, and the shipping containers can be a tool for short-term innovation that will ultimately lead to permanent development.
Though shipping containers are cheap, they aren’t free, and they still need to be turned into usable dwellings. ReJuve launched a crowdfunding campaign with an initial goal of $20,000. Since the launch of the campaign in 2017, ReJuve has raised an astounding $250k. The business continues to thrive and is getting ready to scale globally.
The Future
ReJuve is also exploring how, in the near future, they can implement a tech-enablement component into the Pods. They desire to implement a cloud system that would allow residents to connect with other small businesses to share services and search for information. They believe this will also shrink the digital literacy gap that is prevalent and debilitating to low-income communities.
Wanona continues to work hard to fight the affordable housing crisis and bring opportunities to entrepreneurs and homeowners by providing affordable housing and office spaces using shipping containers. Her relentless devotion to building a better community serves as an inspiration for all.
Your Vision
Container One loves the entrepreneurial spirit that resides in so many people that contact us about purchasing shipping containers. With the affordable and easily accessible storage units that we help you purchase; you also can accelerate the process to make your dream come to life.