Coming soon to McKinney: Sleek Habitat for Humanity Homes Made From Shipping Containers
A new neighborhood on the way in Collin County won’t be a standard suburban tract home community.
The McKinney development will have almost three dozen houses built out of shipping containers. North Collin County Habitat for Humanity plans to build the neighborhood, called Cotton Groves, to provide affordable housing in Dallas’ pricey northern suburbs.
“We could have sold all of them already on the open market,” said Celeste H. Cox, CEO of the North Collin County Habitat for Humanity. “We have a waiting list of 70 families.”
The median home price in McKinney is $338,000, according to the most recent data.
Shipping containers have been used for everything from office parks to luxury homes.
The steel containers have caught the fancy of modern design aficionados who like their sleek, simple style. Habitat will bolt the metal boxes together and stack them to build each of its new homes on McKinney’s east side.
“There are four containers for our 1,280-square-foot, three-bedroom plan,” Cox said. Four- and five-bedroom versions are also planned.
“They will have nice big balconies and carports,” she said. “They’ll have solar panels on the roof, will be highly energy efficient and are low-maintenance.”
The 8- by 40-foot metal boxes will get doors and windows and will be finished out inside like standard homes.
“We are eliminating the lumber framing and the concrete for a foundation slab,” Cox said. “We will be using concrete piers for the foundations.”
The 8- by 40-foot metal boxes will get doors and windows and will be finished out inside like standard homes.
“We wanted to have a unique use for this piece of property that can serve more families,” Cox said. “We also wanted to be able to reduce our construction time.
“It’s going to cut our construction time line from 12 weeks to six or eight weeks.”
Construction on the neighborhood should be underway by early next year.
“We are going to have a prototype on the ground hopefully by the end of October,” Cox said. “We are using it for a training location.”
Habitat volunteers will build out the interiors.
“It will be traditional Habitat for Humanity finishes inside,” said architect Kevin Dingman, who worked with the affordable-housing group on the project. “We don’t want them to look like a tiny house.
“We wanted it to feel like a traditional home.”
Dingman’s plans for the neighborhood show modern-style houses with stone on the first-floor exteriors and carports with wood screens.
“We anticipate doing at least three phases,” he said. “So far, there’s been quite a bit of interest.”
Dingman said he reviewed other projects that used shipping containers for a variety of commercial and residential uses.
“For the past 12 years, I’ve been the in-house architect for Adriatica Village,” a mixed-use McKinney development designed to look like an Eastern European village, he said. “I do custom homes and small commercial buildings.”
Dingman said his only previous work with shipping containers was when he used two of them as part of the construction of a Dallas bar.
Habitat plans to sell each of the McKinney container homes for 30 percent of the buying family’s gross income.
“They will cost about the same” as Habitat’s regular houses, Cox said. “A lot of people are watching this project to see how it turns out.”