Author: Erin Elizabeth

The Little River Box Company, a national real estate group, has won city permission to build a compact house out of two shipping containers and reserve it for a low-income buyer. If things go as planned, a corner lot in South Miami is about to explode with a group of 480-square-foot homes. And if that goes well, they will start to pop up all over Miami-Dade County. Evan Fancher, director of the South Miami anti-blight district, whose backing the project said, “There are these shotgun lots everywhere. There are these right-of-ways and weird corner lots, and no builder will touch them.”1 No one perhaps except Gayle Zalduondo’s team who have already “cut 10 feet off two standard 40-foot cargo containers to fit into the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South Miami lot. The Miami Association of Realtors hired Little River Box to create the South Miami house as a test case in how cargo containers can make it easier to create affordable housing.”1 Check out the video below… Zalduondo, a founding partner at Little River Box Company, even has plans in her office for cargo containers stacked atop each other as a low-cost apartment building “and another set of cottages for a Doral developer who wants to create affordable teacher housing in the parking lot of a planned school.”1 While the company is currently doing one house a week but would eventually...