When Barna Kasa and Wyatt Reed look at shipping containers, they see living spaces.
The two Fremont County entrepreneurs developed a four-unit property in Florence that showcases how shipping containers can be a foundation for affordable housing. Their project, The Industrial Hotel, operates as a bed-and-breakfast inn, but it also serves as a model for economically and sustainably converting shipping containers to housing that can be rented at low cost.
Shipping containers are plentiful and cheap, and they provide the basic structure, Kasa says.
“The first unit we built, with plumbing and electrical, the total cost was $30,000,” he says. Prices doubled during the COVID pandemic, but still, at $60,000 in construction costs, a unit could rent for $500 a month, he says.
Kasa and his wife Erin, who also own Salvage Antiques Vintage Etc., an architectural salvage store in Florence, moved to Cañon City a decade ago. Reed was operating a store called Unbranded, which sold high-end, handmade shoes and clothing and screen-printed T-shirts.
When Kasa visited the store, they got to talking and hit it off, Kasa says, and Reed started sourcing merchandise from Kasa’s antique store.
But Kasa had more ventures he wanted to explore.
Growing up in a small town in socialist Hungary, “we recycled everything,” he says. “We had no waste.” There, he observed a lot of apartments being built using efficient construction methods and high density because housing was needed. He thought he could translate some of those ideas to address the need for affordable housing here.
Kasa’s first project was The Rosedale Vintage Mobile Home Park outside Cañon City, a complex of painstakingly restored mobile homes from the 1950s and 1960s that re-creates a vintage charm.
“Everybody said I was crazy when I was doing it,” he says, but the project garnered lots of publicity and attracted short- and long-term renters. It wasn’t a big step from there to shipping containers, which are about the same size as these mobile homes.
Kasa sketched out a design for a shipping container house and shared it with Reed, who also has construction experience. Kasa owned a Florence lot where he was storing construction materials, and the two decided to build a modular house on top of a shipping container. The plan was to use it as a model home that Reed would occupy.
Working through their companies, Kasa’s KDevelopers and Reed’s Fire Age Design, the entrepreneurs developed their plan and won a pitch competition at Emergent Campus in Florence. But even though the project attracted a lot of positive attention, including praise from Gov. Jared Polis’ office, they had to overcome numerous planning and zoning hurdles and concerns about affordable housing.
“We got tangled up in paperwork,” Reed says. Because of the property’s zoning, the only permissible use of the property that would embrace the concept was a hotel. It took three years to resolve the many issues and get the necessary permits and infrastructure in place.
The first of the units, which are highly energy-efficient and constructed almost entirely of recycled materials, opened in June 2021.
Today at The Industrial, three of the four units are complete and two are being rented as AirB&Bs. The fourth unit is near completion — Reed is working on it when he is available — and there is room for expansion.
The Industrial is listed for sale, but if Kasa and Reed can’t find a buyer, “our best-case scenario is finish up unit three and adding some outdoor seating and patio areas for our guests,” Kasa says.
Reed is supervising construction of another project, BV Basecamp, 16 affordable apartment units constructed of 20 shipping containers in Buena Vista. Reed helped the project’s private developers, Jerry and Tania Champlin, create a design Reed describes as “Ikea meets Uber” — the same concept as The Industrial, but on a larger scale. They created an intricate and complex stacked design Reed calls “a livable piece of art” to fit the shipping containers onto several small lots. Reed expects to finish the project this spring.
Kasa operates and maintains The Industrial and is expanding his architectural salvage store. The pair intends to build additional shipping container housing on another 10-acre industrial storage lot Kasa owns in Florence but prohibitive infrastructure costs have delayed that.
They haven’t given up on their original idea of championing much-needed affordable housing in Colorado. Smaller developers can lead the way, Reed says, but community leaders and planners need to be more open to innovative housing concepts and make the approval process “still thorough but a little less arduous.”
When the BV Basecamp project is completed, “we plan to bring focus back to affordable manufactured housing built in Florence, as well as a series of courses on container home and general construction,” Kasa says.
