Living in a shipping Container

Youtube/Kirsten Dirksen

It’s no secret that San Francisco housing prices have shot through the roof.

A home with a mummified corpse in it sold for over a million dollars. And real-estate marketplace Zumper rates San Francisco as officially the most expensive rental market in the country.

But this might be the surest sign of all that the Bay Area housing market has gone completely haywire: a Wharton grad is trying to get people to live (illegally) in converted shipping containers.

Luke Iseman, 31, leases a 17, 000-square-foot warehouse in Oakland in which he has built 11 micro residences out of cargo containers, Bloomberg reports. He charges $1, 000 per months for each of the makeshift homes, which aren’t legal, strictly speaking. Iseman and his “cargotopia” (as he calls it) have been chased from two other locations by the authorities. But that hasn’t dampened his spirit.

On Iseman’s website, he lays out the cargotopia manifesto: “We're living in a solar-powered, sustainable home we built for less than the cost of a car. Chickens in the yard, fast internet, occasionally-alive gardens, and providing affordable homes for our friends: it's getting harder and harder to consider our sustainability a sacrifice.”

Iseman has plans to monetize his adventure through his website, Boxouse. On Boxouse, he sells fully furnished box houses (for $20, 000), DIY kits, and building plans.