McGill Company, Inc CEO aims to create housing, jobs, education with used shipping containers on the Gulf Coast

Demetris English, CEO & President of McGill Company Inc a Minnesota corporation., talks Friday about bringing shipping container homes to the Gulf Coast as early as next year.  

NEW ORLEANS — CEO & President of McGill Company, Inc (MCI) sees a growing number of developers looking to create new housing on the city’s many vacant lots, but he sees his mission as especially unique, and not only because it plans to build homes from recycled steel shipping containers.

In addition to creating newly built housing for people with low incomes, Demetris English wants to educate and employ them.

At the same time, English says the group wants to borrow a proven concept from Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit housing provider that raises revenue to build homes by selling items at its ReStores. MCI hopes to generate money for its three-pronged mission by building homes and accessory dwellings from containers that can be placed anywhere.

While they will be some what new to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, shipping container developments exist around the nation. English said he spent the past five years traveling to study the communities, in an effort to obtain advice and avoid repeating any mistakes developers made in starting  

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The CEO recently won highest bidder on 4 of 5 properties he placed bids on in Mississippi to rezone two lots, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi to build two of the container-based homes.

Demetris sees them serving as a pilot project, or “spec homes” for now, that will allow the public and potential partner organizations to see them finished with exteriors, drywall interiors and all of the other amenities of stick-built homes.

Those models could be critical to acquiring grants to help subsidize the homes’ costs for buyers, since some larger container homes will be priced up to $250,000 and traditional mortgage lenders could be leery of lending that much in distressed neighborhoods where property values are too low to make them worth their construction costs, Demetris said.

“If Habitat for Humanity really will jump on board, if United Way really will jump on board, that allows me to do a whole lot more,” Demetris said. “A lot of them are kind of dancing around the issue and have said yes if you get them built we will throw some money at it… so that we can go in and appraise it and say this is the value, and from there on you’ll have a price tag for these.”

“But there is this huge chasm of people who really are on the lower end of the spectrum who officially have no help,” he said. “The only options that they have are rentals that in a lot of ways are subpar and Section 8, which has huge waiting lists that are difficult to get into. I’m meeting people who are moving to other states just for Section 8 housing. That’s sad.”

The rezoned  lots will receive homes that are about 1,200 square feet but Demetris said a buyer already has ordered a smaller unit to be placed on his property for $150,000.

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Demetris said some people already living in neighborhoods have told him they’re worried that the homes, appraising for more than the value of their homes, will cause their property taxes to increase.

“So I’m doing this crazy balance in between trying to do something that’s service-oriented to help with the people who live in the area, while also improving the area, while also being conscious about what the value of homes is going to do to the taxes,” he said. “So simultaneously building lower-priced homes but the idea would be to also have a sprinkling of homes in there that are not $130,000 and falling apart. In order to really renew an area and develop it you need to have a variation of housing and in value.” The jobs and education components will come in the container homes’ construction, as people are recruited to learn skilled trades as they work on the homes at the company's facility set to begin in January of 2022.

While the Gulf Coast has yet to sign on with any funding support, its planning staff gave the company rezoning a favorable recommendation. 

“This is something novel, these container homes,” Dexter Tracey CEO of Dexter Tracey, Inc said, “but I think with more familiarity with them … I like the energy efficiency that is described in these homes. The architectural rendering is quite handsome. I’m open to supporting such a pilot project, especially in an area where we desperately need to see housing stock increase.”