Among the ideas that local business and community leaders heard about on their recent Super Region Canvas trip to Arizona’s Sun Corridor is that of a residential development currently under construction in downtown Phoenix that’s made of shipping containers.
Containers on Grand, as the development is called, will transform 16 shipping containers—each weighing about 10,000 pounds—from the Port of Long Beach into eight, avant-garde apartment units.
Downtown Development District Executive Director Davis Rhorer says the idea is intriguing, and something downtown leaders will keep in mind as they explore alternative housing options for downtown.
“I’m interested in any type of modular development like that,” says Rhorer, who was among the 150 attendees on the Canvas trip that began on Sunday and wrapped up Tuesday. “I’m gathering information about different types of housing starts and units because we have identified some potential sites downtown and are looking at possible ways to develop them residentially.”
To that end, Rhorer and others from the DDD staff are planning an informal trip in late May to Houston, where they will cycle around the Buffalo Bayou greenway to explore new housing developments along the bayou park. Buffalo Bayou runs through the center of Houston and has been transformed in recent years into an urban greenspace with hundreds of acres of parks and miles of trails.
It’s the inspiration for a study underway to redevelop the LSU lakes and it’s also a model for Baton Rouge’s downtown greenway that’s currently under construction. The greenway will eventually link downtown with the lakes, the Southdowns neighborhood and, eventually, neighborhoods in the southeast portions of the parish.
“We’re going to study that area and see how they put those pieces together because the greenway is the thing that drew people to develop along there,” Rhorer says. “We want our greenway to be the same sort of catalyst.”
—Stephanie Riegel
