BUENA VISTA – Jerry Champlin had a plan to help ease the housing crunch in Buena Vista. Why not build a dozen tiny homes around a central courtyard on a residential lot a block from downtown and rent them out for $1,000 a month?
He bought a small home on a big lot in 2019 and floated his plan. Six years later, he’s about to start renting. But the plan, pushed and shoved by local rules and soaring costs, has changed.
He’s now stacked 21 shipping containers around the courtyard in a community he’s called BV Basecamp. He built 16 units in 17 of those steel boxes and the rest are community spaces for office work, storage and studios.
And his rents have climbed a bit. He’s got furnished 160-square-foot units available for $1,150. The larger containers, about 640 square feet, are renting for $2,650.
“I ended up with more of an art project that you get to live inside versus an affordable village of tiny homes,” says the first-time developer whose background includes a civil engineering degree and building a technology company.
It is one of the largest residential communities built entirely of shipping containers in the country. And it’s one of several new housing projects — some traditional and some innovative — about to open in Buena Vista.
Jerry Champlin, a first-time developer, has built a 16-unit rental community out of shipping containers in downtown Buena Vista. “It’s been a fun adventure,” he says. (Brian Malone, Special to The Colorado Sun)“To do a creative project like this. You have to be willing to take on a lot of risk and, in hindsight, I had to be kind of clueless. I did not know exactly what I was getting myself into, but I needed to have the wherewithal to get through it,” says Champlin, who has lived in a 750-square-foot home for the past four years with his three kids and wife. “If I had known what I know now, in 2021, I would have stuck with my original plan and figured out how to get it through. I would have found a way to force it through, and it would have cost a lot less to build, and we would be up and operational and done a few years ago.”
The designs inside the shipping container homes are ingenious, with toilets inside showers, a la urban apartments in Europe. Artistic tiling and custom shelving — built by a North Dakota woodworker using trees downed by the ash borer — are in every apartment. Custom closets and cabinets are built from 13-layer plywood. Walls have sliding pocket doors to save space.
There are not many multi-unit residential complexes built out of shipping containers in the U.S., so Champlin spent countless hours working with local planners. (In Amsterdam, developers two decades ago took eight months to build a student housing community from 1,034 shipping containers, the largest residential container complex in the world.)
He had to adapt his plan to existing code, even when it did not necessarily make a lot of sense for homes built with steel. Every unit has sprinklers, even though it’s next to impossible to ignite steel. He had to overly insulate the nearly airtight steel boxes that can be heated with a candle. He cantilevered and staggered stacked boxes and cut in windows to meet town design standards that prevent plain walls from facing streets.
“It’s been a fun adventure,” he says, touring the white stacks of containers he bought after they were used to haul goods from Asia. “A lot of these codes are here for good reason. Some of them should have some flexibility though. Like how can we interpret the spirit of the law versus the actual letter of the law? I think that’s something that cities and counties could look at a little more closely. Part of it is the legal system in this country. We are sue happy.”
BV Basecamp is renting 160 square-foot shipping container homes for $1,150 a month and 640 square-foot three-bedroom units are $2,650. The interiors are designed to maximize space. (Brian Malone, , Special to The Colorado Sun)He recently began announcing his rental prices and he winces as he recalls the occasional online squawking from anonymous people who think he’s charging too much. (Which is ubiquitous for all mountain-town landlords fielding grief from old-timer locals who bought homes decades ago and remember rents from before they bought.)
He had to raise rents to meet the monthly revenue requirements from his lender, he says. And he had to secure more financing as he incurred close to $500,000 in unexpected costs. He planned for 15% in unplanned expenses. He’s closer to 30%, with a total spend of nearly $3.5 million so far.
“I want to reply to some of them and say ‘Have you ever built anything?’ I don’t think they have. They would not be blasting me if they ever tried to go out and build something,” he says. “Sure there is development that is based on greed. This is not development based on greed. We set out to provide housing at, ideally, a more cost-effective price point than other people and that’s what we’ve done.”
Jerry Champlin pours peat moss into planters at his BV Basecamp shipping container home project last week. He expects to start renting units in the 16-home complex in the next couple weeks. (Brian Malone, Special to The Colorado Sun)New housing all over Buena Vista
BV Basecamp is one of many new housing projects coming online in Buena Vista. Across town, the innovative Fading West factory recently built and installed 60 units for the Midland Apartments complex, with half the units for local workers earning below the average median income. Studios there rent for $1,100 a month and two-bedroom units are $2,339.
Across the alley from the shipping containers at Basecamp BV, The Boulders is about to start offering rentals. That 90-unit project — built in an Opportunity Zone by Steamboat Springs-based Four Points Funding — is a mix of single-family homes, duplexes and apartments above garages. The Boulders is renting three-bedroom homes for $2,695 a month and one-bedroom apartments for $1,395 a month. The Boulders also has homes for sale, priced from $895,000 to $945,000.
And some of the first 3D printed homes in Colorado are in Buena Vista, just on the edge of the new-urbanist South Main community. Unveiled earlier this year, the 1,110-square-foot homes by developer VeroTouch are designed as models for expedited, energy-efficient construction, with initial homes priced at $650,000.
Town of Buena Vista on a late summer morning, August 28, 2023, in Chaffee County. The town population is nearly 3,000 people, according to the 2020 United States Census. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)Champlin hopes he can inspire smaller designs and maybe help persuade local planning officials to adjust codes to allow out-of-the-box concepts that can help ease housing prices.
“A tough nut to crack”
Joel Benson served as the mayor and planning director in Buena Vista before transitioning over to a policy advisor working on special projects and long-term planning around water and housing. He said the town’s code was designed with flexibility built in. Still, many builders seek broader changes to the town’s building codes. But town planners can’t simply change the code to accommodate some of those requests.
The BV Basecamp project built 16 housing units on a downtown parcel in Buena Vista. (Brian Malone, Special to The Colorado Sun)“There are limits to what those changes can be,” he said. “If the processes need to change, they can change but that needs to go through a public process. Certainly if there is a better way to do things, the Board of Trustees is open to making changes.”
Benson said there are political and legal ramifications if the trustees choose to ignore certain parts of the town code. When developers have urged changes — the owner of the Fading West factory, for example, several years ago asked for certain exceptions to accommodate his manufactured homes at Buena Vista’s attainable housing community The Farm — sometimes those end up as permanent changes to the code, Benson said.
More than half of the housing projects proposed in Buena Vista are “unique,” Benson says, and seek some adjustments or exceptions to town codes.
“Almost all of them are like, ‘Can we do this differently?’” Benson says. “And we have some projects that are so unique that it takes a long time. Jerry and I have talked a lot and he certainly had a tough nut to crack.”
Joel Benson served as mayor and planner for Buena Vista and is now an advisor shepherding the town’s long-term planning and special projects. (Brian Malone, Special to The Colorado Sun)Buena Vista does not have specific design standards that mandate what a building will look like.
“I mean there’s a railroad car right over there,” he says, pointing across the town’s Main Street where a resident converted a train car into a home. “And that was built to code. Generally if there is something in the code that inhibits something important for the community, let’s talk to staff and let’s talk to the trustees and let’s change the code. That happens all the time.”
“A confused mind says ‘no’”
Wyatt Reed, who built a small hotel out of shipping containers in Florence, has spent nearly four years working with Champlin to design and build the BV Basecamp project. He knew it would take a long time to work with local planners on what he says is the largest shipping container community in Colorado.
Reed said the barrage of codes that raise the cost of construction “make it impossible to create cost-competitive housing.”
Containers are a new frontier for high-density housing, Reed says. Most of his projects are single-family homes or cabins he builds in Florence and ships to owners.
The 21 shipping containers at BV Basecamp include 16 homes and shared office, studio and storage space stacked around a central courtyard. (Brian Malone, Special to The Colorado Sun)He knows he’s at the very forefront of a movement using the ubiquitous containers for clustered, affordable housing. It requires massaging when container housing projects land with local planning commissions.
“A confused mind says ‘no.’ When you bring something new that’s not totally understood, it’s easy to say no,” Reed says. “But if we are sign to find a new way to build homes for the long-term and make them affordable, we have to develop a new way. That requires education and helping people look around the corners. It can’t be adversarial. It’s educational. How can I help you with your concerns?”
A lot of homebuilders don’t really like working with steel. And people who can cut and weld steel are not necessarily into woodwork. Reed has designed coursework to help the divergent trades overlap, which can reduce labor costs for shipping container projects.
Containers can be the answer for first-time buyers struggling to find footing in towns where homes sell for millions, Reed says. They cost very little to maintain, with no siding or roofs. Start in a single container and as you make more money and your family grows, add more. It’s inexpensive and scalable, he says. And the construction process with shipping containers produces a lot less waste.
“This can be one way to solve our housing issues if we open our eyes a bit wider,” Reed says.
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