|
From surf to turf
By Molly Parker
Staff Writer
A merchant mariner through his early 20s, David Cross spent countless days in ship wheelhouses, responsible for safe navigation of vessels carrying thousands of cargo containers full of goods around the world.
All that time at sea does things to a man, Cross said. One is to make him think.
“After four years on the sea staring at the containers,” he said, “you figure you can do other things with them besides ship things.”
Like build things.
Late last month, Cross, 44, stood outside the ConGlobal Industries North Charleston depot surrounded by the pieces of his first official business deal for his newly formed company, SG Blocks LLC.
Four shipping containers with some missing side panels and apertures for doors and windows sat strapped to flatbed trucks. The next day, the retrofitted cargo containers would be shipped to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where they would meet up with similarly recycled shipping containers from ConGlobal depots in Jacksonville, Fla., and Norfolk, Va.
In a matter of days, the boxes would be welded together and turned into a 5,000-square-foot administrative building.
“It’s amazing to see these buildings go together with these blocks,” said Bruce Russell, a Colorado businessman who has been involved in a number of construction and development ventures, and is now a managing partner with SG Blocks, where he is responsible for the business side of the company.
“They’re so precise,” said Russell. “In the construction business, we’re not used to precise.”
The ‘container guy’
Though Cross has been at this endeavor for a number of years, with the formation of SG Blocks—the SG stands for safe and green—Cross is hoping to sell his design to the masses as an alternative to traditional housing structures.
“Prior to that, I was just the guy that did stuff with containers,” he said.
At times, as a young man, Cross said, the sea could be a lonely place. But somewhere during voyages spanning from New Jersey to India to Africa and places in between, Cross developed an affinity for his silent companions.
He can recite their specs: 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, 9.5 feet tall, weighing 8,500 pounds—they come in other sizes, too, he said, but these are most valuable for building. He counts among his heroes Malcom McClean, the North Carolina man credited with designing the box that is today’s shipping industry standard.
“This is my lifeblood,” Cross said, apologizing for so quickly spouting out cargo container facts, as if his enthusiasm for boxes might overwhelm a newcomer to the world of shipping.
It has taken a good deal of time, Cross admitted, to sell the public on the idea that the 4.25-ton cargo containers piling up in port cities courtesy of America’s trade deficit could be recycled into homes that have no resemblance to cargo containers.
Still, Cross is confident the steel containers can provide safer, more durable and environmentally friendly structures for homes than traditional building supplies, and simultaneously bring down homeowners’ insurance rates.
He’s already been featured on home improvement honcho Bob Vila’s TV show in a series of episodes that aired earlier this year.
First tested in N. Charleston
Cross’s container-to-home innovation was first tested about three years ago in North Charleston, on a plot of land owned by city resident Magoline Hazelton. Her own house aging and failing, she had applied for a home reconstruction grant program, and a container-based house went up in its place in October 2004 as a joint project between Cross, the city of North Charleston, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Hazelton said she still catches people slowing down outside her house and staring. “They just can’t believe a house was built out of containers,” she said.
North Charleston Councilman Kurt Taylor said he hopes the city looks to SG Blocks to advance the low-income housing program now that a system is in place to mass produce them. He sees it as a solution to get people into new homes more quickly and to ease the blight of piled-up boxes.
“I was concerned that people would see this and say, ‘You’re just putting poor people in containers,’” Taylor said. “That’s clearly not in the least what we have here. You can’t tell it apart from any other construction method.”
After Hazelton’s house went up, Cross’s next project was a $1 million private home in Redondo, Calif. He then took his design to St. Petersburg, Fla., where two homes were built side-by-side through a partnership with an affiliate of Neighbor Works America, a nonprofit organization, and Tampa Armature Works, a business specializing in industrial closures that worked with Cross on the use of containers, and that briefly dabbled in residential housing at Cross’s urging.
It was in Florida that Cross caught Vila’s eye.
Building blocks
Several features of the cargo boxes are desirable for housing, he said. They are modular, waterproof and strong, and are equipped with four steel bars that allow them to be stacked up to nine units high.
In short order, the boxes can be quickly welded together, Cross said, providing an all-steel structure that he believes could weather a major storm.
“The extreme forces a container is exposed to on the deck of a ship on a 3,000-mile voyage far and away exceeds the dynamic forces it would be exposed to during an earthquake in Southern California or a hurricane in South Carolina,” he said.
Their advertised durability is a big part of the reason Cross and Russell secured a meeting earlier this month with the Georgia Office of Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, he said. Insurance companies, Cross said, have also called inquiring about the home structures.
To meet its construction and design goals, SG Blocks recently formed a partnership with Alberici Constructors and Lawrence Group, an architectural firm, both also headquartered in St. Louis. The containers are purchased wholesale from ConGlobal Industries, the nation’s largest retailer of cargo containers, according to the company’s Web site.
Aside from the building in Fort Bragg, SG Blocks has a number of additional projects under way, including construction of a retirement villa in a Southern California community and a condominium complex in South Carolina, though Cross wouldn’t disclose the location because of ongoing negotiations.
The only snag the company has met, Cross said, is that cities currently do not have building codes for the metal structures since the design is new to the United States. Educating inspectors about the process slows down construction a bit, he said, but they have to pioneer their design in a city only once before the process is in place.
Container-housing costs
The price for a home built with SG blocks—the name of the modified containers—is about $22 to $30 per square foot for the frame, Russell said. A typical single-family South Carolina home ranging from 1,280 square feet to 1,920 square feet would take four to six blocks to build, he said, at a cost of between $40,000 and $60,000 for the shell. A finished house is comparable in cost to other forms of construction, he said.
“If we can get the systems right, and prove it works, then we have a system that really makes sense,” said Russell. “It’s very green, and there are a lot of blocks capable of being used for this process. There’s really no limitation on that.”
There are two major factors for the box buildup, namely that the United States imports more than it exports, and when steel prices are low, it’s more expensive to ship the containers back empty than to build new ones.
Further, the boxes generally have only a seven-year life span on the sea before they are retired.
And to recycle the unused boxes into steel beams, it takes nearly 8,000 kilowatts of energy and costs about $800. It takes just 5% of that energy, or about 400 kW, to turn the boxes into homes, Cross said.
Outside the box
Currently, it appears that SG Blocks is the only U.S. company specializing in cargo-container homes, though a number of businesses are thinking outside the box, so to speak.
Some 3,500 companies in the United States are dedicated to offering alternative uses to steel shipping containers, said John Finnessy, executive director of the National Portable Storage Association, the trade organization that represents these businesses.
Most companies buy the containers and sell them as temporary storage units or office space, though some of the more unusual uses include a wave machine for artificial surfing by New Jersey-based Sea Box Co., and the construction of several large 85- by 120-foot movie screens in New York’s Central Park commissioned in 1995 by Walt Disney for the showing of Pocahontas, and later by the Vatican, to project a speech by the Pope.
“A small percentage of our people are starting to dabble in what’s becoming this container housing market,” Finnessy said. “I think it is something more and more people are looking at. It seems to be a much more popular trend in Europe. It is not something that’s really caught on here in the states as of yet.”
Molly Parker is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at mparker@charlestonbusiness.com.
|
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Version