[dcolkitt]

It will if you stack them eight stories high.

Don't know where you live, but I doubt it's more expensive land than San Francisco, where the average acre of land costs $3.2 million[1]. Taking that acre of land, save half the area for green-space and courtyard. Use half the footprint for shipping containers. Stack the containers 8 high.

You now have 242 double-pod units. The amortized land cost per unit is $13,000. Assuming a generous rental yield of 12%, the land cost only adds $130 a month to the rent. That's hardly anything for a 720 square foot apartment.

The lesson is that even San Francisco land costs are no match for the power of high-rise high-density housing.

[1] https://www.6sqft.com/study-shows-huge-disparity-in-u-s-urba...

[patmcc]

Same ballpark ($2-3 million/acre) - and yeah, you're not wrong that if you can get approval for 250 units in an acre you can have reasonably priced housing. But the hard part in that equation is convincing whoever controls zoning to allow for it - once you do that, whether it's shipping containers or traditional construction you can have affordable housing.