James Blakemore (founder) describes Evergreen Manufacturing / Innovative Habitats and their mission to repurpose shipping containers into affordable, sustainable housing and commercial structures. He positions himself as the company visionary/administrator and introduces partner Carrie DePalma as the construction lead. The company aims to address workforce housing shortages (notably in West Texas oil fields), homeless and low-income populations, and international needs by converting used shipping containers into durable, low-cost homes. The speaker also references a completed 1,440 sq ft, three-bedroom, two-bath container house and invites viewers to see it in person.
Questions this video answers
February 17, 2016
1,440 square feet
Three bedrooms and two full bathrooms
Carrie DePalma — oversees construction from design through final construction and shipping.
Chapters
My role in the company is visionary. I'm kind of the administrator guy. I kind of keep the vision going. My partner, Carrie DePalma, has got years of experience in building part model homes and modular homes. I'll be overseeing all the construction steps from design to final construction and shipping. We want to take and repurpose resources that have already been used. We're taking shipping containers and turning them into houses, into commercial structures, into offices, into useful products, rather than sitting on a dock just waiting to rust away. The neat thing about using shipping containers is the flexibility is just, is so wide and it just defies your imagination to figure out how many things you can use one of these repurposed shipping containers for. To think that you're producing something that's going to last year after year, decade after decade, and to be able to help some of these people that really can't afford a stick built, contemporary type home, affordable housing is, I get a big, a lot of pleasure out of being able to provide these homes affordable, sustainable, well built for a lot of people. I grew up on a ranch in West Texas and one of the most important things about being on a ranch was learning how to conserve our natural resources. And that carried through for all of my life. And one of the reasons why I started Evergreen Manufacturing, the original vision for this company came out of workforce housing in the oil field. My background is in the oil business and I was noticing that people, people in west Texas, in the oil fields of West Texas, were living in camper trailers, pop up trailers and tents simply because there wasn't any place to live. Man camps were full. And there's an inherent disadvantage to people in a man camp. Most workers don't like living in man camps and if they've got families, they certainly can't live in a man camp. So I was looking for a way to provide housing that was semi permanent and shipping containers were an ideal answer to that. My vision, our vision here at Evergreen and Innovative Habitats is to revolutionize housing in the United States and around the world. We believe that we can help house the people that don't have houses. We can provide good housing, comfortable housing, safe and secure housing for homeless and low income people all over the country and in again in the third world countries. Both Carrie and I have the experience and the vision necessary to make sure that we are able to help people. We've been talking about container homes, we've been talking about construction using containers. I'm sitting in one, sitting in a 1440 square foot, three bedroom, two full bath house. Full kitchen, living room. We have a house here. Come look at it. We'd love to show you around, Sam.
