House-in-a-box

"The population is expected to rise, along with the average age of its residents, while the public housing stock is decreasing. There is an impending shortage of affordable housing."

 "Since 2007, the city has built an average fewer than 100 public housing units per year, although at least 500 must be added each year to cover the needs of seniors and others."

The squeeze among an expanding and aging population, skyrocketing rents, and limited options is hardly unique. These dire predictions were written, not about Southwest Florida, but about Prague, the picturesque capital city of the Czech Republic.

Experts from the Prague Institute of Planning and Development have proposed ways to deal with the impeding shortage of affordable housing, in the ambitiously titled New Strategic Plan for the Capital City of Prague.

A Prague housing policy, now been in place for 11 years, has over time hardened into a formal document which remains more or less ignored. Tenants have to pay around CZK 18,000 ($815 U.S.) a month for an 800-square-foot flat. To buy their own place, the average family must save nearly 11 years' earnings.

But resilient and resourceful Praguers have come up with their own solutions. According to Adela Zichackova from the Shared Houses project, which has developed communal co-housing as an option, "It is a kind of necessity for us, because the costs of living in Prague are rising. Both rents and prices of properties are going up. For instance, the rent goes up by 20 percent each year."

A different kind of solution, notable in its use of blatantly promotional English signage, lies along visitors' daily tram route to go sightseeing in Old Town. It sits in front of the historic 1930s Zizkov Freight Station, denoted as a national cultural monument in 2010 by the Ministry of Culture but nevertheless sagging and rusted with age.

On the fringe of the freight station's warehouses full of antiques and other goods, a sign blares "ROOMS CHEAP!!!" An arrow points unmistakably to a stack of repurposed blue-and-white shipping containers behind it.


It doesn't even meet the minimal standards of nearby 1-star hostels, and yet who wouldn't want to live  more affordably in a stack of containers in an abandoned rail yard?

A row of upright poles channels electricity to two dozen flats, which are lit up at night and have a shared kitchen as well as a source of water and toilets--visible through an unattended office's window. Rickety wooden stairs climb the rear of the structure to reach the rooms.

When I phoned to find out more about the place, I told the informative young man who answered that I was an American journalist visiting Prague and interested in learning more. He must have thought even less of journalists' pay than we do, because he assumed I was looking for a place to stay.

"It's not exactly a pleasant place," he said, "but it is quite cheap. About $130 a month U.S. Except, it's full up now, so you can't get a room."

Renters elsewhere in Prague might have banded together in small house-sharing cooperatives, but, he explained proudly, his storage containers are the only such creative option in the city. His tenants are mostly students and transient tram and bus drivers.

But posters plastered on the property's chain-link fence, which promise a "novou rezidencni ctvrt" (new residential district), indicate a new development looming in the future.

The young man struggled to find the English words for "Permitting takes forever around here," but I caught his drift.

Within a couple of years, Central Group, the Czech Republic's largest developer, will demolish this single creative answer to Prague's housing dilemma, to make room for what one hopes will be affordable new apartments for Zizkov.

  

Developer's rendering of the 2,600 new residences coming to the area of the 1930s Zizkov Freight Station. The main station building was named a national monument by the Ministry of Culture, a move challenged by neighbors and real estate developers who'd hoped to house 15,000 people there instead.