From time to time self storage facility owners run into a problem with people sleeping in their storage units. To a homeless person living without shelter, a storage unit may seem like paradise -- it has four walls and a roof, a door to lock, and relatively low rent. The main problem is that storage units do not meet zoning codes for human habitation. It’s okay to spend time there during the day, but sleeping in a storage unit is strictly forbidden. They do not have bathrooms or kitchens, are not ventilated, and do not have a second exit in case of a fire. They were not designed to be transitional housing or emergency housing. Nevertheless, policymakers having to deal with large waves of people made homeless by natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and Haiti’s earthquake are starting to take a second look at the possibility of creating temporary shelters out of certain kinds of storage units -- portable storage units, which are sometimes called pods, and shipping containers used on container ships.
In Haiti, the need for emergency housing is particularly acute right now, as many survivors of the Port-au-Prince earthquake are still living in tents. The Red Cross is scrambling to build more permanent homes for earthquake survivors. But even the process of building permanent homes displaces some survivors yet again, because they must move off the land that will then become a construction site. It is a challenge to come up with land on which to build homes in Haiti, because much of the land is still covered with slabs of broken concrete from the earthquake. Haiti does not have the resources it would need to move those slabs, which take up about 25 million cubic yards of space.
“It would take 1,000 heavy trucks working every day for three to five years just to clear the rubble,” explains Julie Sell, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, at NJ.com this week.
Until decent housing is provided to those who are displaced again, the only thing the Red Cross can do for Haitians facing hurricane season living in a tent was to offer them better tarpaulins. A few weeks ago, 350 tents in a Port-au-Prince suburb were blown away by storm winds, and six people were injured by flying tent poles.
The Gulf Coast states in the U.S. regularly must cope with the problem of coming up with housing for people who have lost their homes to hurricanes. Many of the victims of 2008 Hurricane Ike are still living in transitional housing. But they are fortunate to be living in actual buildings with good, drinkable water supplies. For small-scale disasters, like local flooding, FEMA can usually manage to put victims up in hotels and apartments. For larger-scale disasters, FEMA relies on trailers. But when a disaster of mammoth proportions, like Hurricane Katrina, comes along, the number of refugees tends to dwarf the amount of housing that is available.
Portable storage company PODS initially developed temporary emergency housing after its founder, Pete Warhurst, found out that the 2004 and 2005 hurricane survivors were taking shelter in POD storage units.
“In about ten minutes time, we can have a family with a place to sleep for the night,” Warhurst told The Post and Courier in 2007, just after the emergency housing was released to the market.
The temporary housing pods look just like storage pods on the outside, but on the inside they are air-conditioned and feel like the inside of a motor home. Five people can live there indefinitely, with beds, a refrigerator, a stove, a bathroom, and a generator. The temporary housing pods have all the amenities that regular stand alone storage units do not -- which is why they are approved to be used as housing, and regular storage units are not zoned for it. However, FEMA held off on investing in the housing PODS, choosing to use trailers instead.
The following year, pressure began to mount for FEMA to find some form of temporary housing to have on hand for survivors of disasters. FEMA announced it would not house disaster victims in trailers any more. But the agency did not say where it planned for survivors to live instead. The state of Mississippi developed its own temporary housing, called Mississippi Cottages -- tiny sturdy little houses that it keeps lined up and ready to ship to wherever the next hurricane may strike. The Mississippi Cottages have tin roofs and tiny porches. They are on wheels, but can be put on permanent foundations. All have appliances, furniture, ceiling fans, and a kitchen and bathroom. In fact, Hurricane Katrina victims Vicki Ladner Meshell and her husband, Rickey, told a New York Times reporter that they like their Mississippi Cottage so much that they hope to buy it one day.
The problem with developing emergency housing is that it presents a catch 22. Policymakers say that if the housing is too nice, like the Mississippi Cottages, people like it so well that they never want to move out of it. “They’re too nice,” Mike Womack, the executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency told The New York Times. “I’ve heard this over and over again.”
If the housing is too cheap, tiny, and uncomfortable, though, it may not be suitable for human habitation. In 2007, thousands of Louisiana residents who lost their homes to Hurricanes Katrina or Rita in 2005 sued the makers of the trailers they were housed in by FEMA, alleging that manufacturers had rushed to make the temporary trailers and, in their hurry, used inferior materials that were high in formaldehyde, exposing hurricane survivors to dangerous levels of the chemical.
Not all of Hurricane Katrina’s victims were housed in trailers -- many were put into hotels or rented apartments, and FEMA’s housing bill skyrocketed into hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ironically, the Hurricane Katrina trailers used by FEMA -- the same trailers FEMA was sued over -- are turning back up along the Gulf Coast in the wake of the BP oil spill. The trailers were never destroyed, but were instead sold in auctions, with the warning that they should be used for storage, not housing. But merchants who bought them in 2007 are reselling them now, for housing, often to companies that will use them to house Gulf Coast oil cleanup workers, according to an editorial in The St. Petersburg Times earlier this month, and yesterday’s New York Times.
Sources used:
Desvarieux, Jessica. “Haiti’s homeless: is ‘transitional’ housing the solution?” TIME. July 16, 2010.
Dickinson, Elizabeth Evitts. “Letter from Baltimore: storage pods for disaster relief?” MetropolisMag.com. July 23, 2010.
Eaton, Leslie. “Agency is under pressure to develop disaster housing.” The New York Times. April 13, 2008.
“Haiti earthquake: converting shipping containers into emergency housing.” Science Daily. Jan. 17, 2010.
“Homelessness and Poverty: Washington, D.C.” The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.
“Homeless seek housing in storage units.” KHON. March 27, 2009.
Jervis, Rick, and Heath, Brad. “FEMA spends almost $3B on emergency housing.” USA Today. Aug. 26, 2008.
“Katrina trailers return to present new risks to workers.” The St. Petersburg Times. At TampaBay.com. July 6, 2010.
Lee, Renee. “Ike victims get another housing extension.” The Houston Chronicle. July 6, 2010.
Meinhold, Bridget. “Shipping containers could provide disaster relief for Haiti.” Inhabitat.com. Jan. 19, 2010.
“Shipping containers provide housing for stricken Haiti.” Handy Shipping Guide. July 29, 2010.
Stacy, Mitch. “PODS for people offer shelter after disasters.” The Post and Courier. July 26, 2007.
Urbina, Ian. “Banned trailers return for latest Gulf disaster.” The New York Times. June 30, 2010.