Modular Transportation Housing Inc., commonly known as M T Housing Inc., is quietly building a reputation for delivering affordable, comfortable temporary housing that is ideal for rugged locations and harsh climates. As a result, the Yakima, Wash.-based manufacturer is seeing its business connections in Alaska strengthen and multiply, especially among construction contractors and mining companies who venture into the remotest corners of the state.
“Our housing is being used in Prudhoe Bay, Deadhorse, Kipnuk, Barrow, Kodiak Island and Kotzebue. And we just finished a project for Akutan Corp. on the island of Akun in the Aleutian Islands,” Stacy “Stolt” Stoltenow, vice president of M T Housing, said in a recent interview.
In fact, M T Housing dates much of its own history by its work for customers in Alaska.
“The first camp we built in Alaska was for Teck Cominco 14 years ago, and it’s still in use,” Stoltenow said. “We also have our housing at the Greens Creek Mine in Southeast Alaska.”
Innovative design
The company got its start in the mid-1990s when the Yakima Valley suffered an acute shortage of housing for farm workers. Both Stoltenow and Steve Forney, president and founder of M T Housing, grew up in the agricultural region, which is renowned for growing apples and other fruits and vegetables.
Forney, an apple grower himself, fashioned two housing units from standard 8-feet-wide by 40-feet-long by 9.6-feet-tall shipping containers. He showed the results to Washington State’s governor, whose interest led to the state government purchasing 40 units from Forney to house 220 farm workers.
Despite this early coup, Forney said he realized that his firm “couldn’t just sell housing to the farm industry.”
In seeking a larger market, he thought the sturdiness of the units and their mobility might appeal to Alaskans who live and work in severe weather and rugged locales.
On the advice of a friend, Forney tried advertising in Alaska. He also attended a mining convention where he met a vice president of Teck Cominco who purchased that first 25-man camp for the Red Dog Mine.
That camp is still in use at the mine, boasted Stoltenow.
Indeed, the ISO-certified cargo containers that M T Housing has used to build mining, logging and construction camps, engineering trailers, field labs, dormitories, offices, urban housing, hospitals and dental clinics, rehab and exercise facilities, churches and daycare centers, classrooms and showrooms, banks and credit union buildings, are virtually indestructible.
Virtually indestructible
The units have high insulation values – R24 for the walls and R38 for the floors and ceilings. They are also virtually indestructible, withstanding winds up to 150 mph, snow loads of 400 pounds-per-square-foot and higher and reportedly, most small arms gunfire.
This, M T Housing learned when one of the first camps that it built was shipped to Peru for use on a mining project. When personnel reported getting shot at, Stoltenow said the mining company was forced to abandon the project.
“But they said that as long at the gunfire came from small caliber weapons, up to 30-caliber, they felt safe inside the units,” he said.
Sturdiness, however, does not preclude luxury, according to Forney.
As an example, he cited the 60-bedroom housing facility his company built for Little Red Services in Deadhorse which has private bathrooms and showers in every bedroom.
What sets the units apart from the competition is their patented design.
“We have finishes inside that are very pleasant,” said Forney. “While most people think of a shipping container as being a box, I see it as being a LEGO®. Some facilities have dining rooms that are 120-feet (long) by 40-feet (wide). We take out the walls on the sides, the floors and the ceilings. We put stairs in them. Everything you can imagine, we do to them.”
Forney’s method of connecting the units and sealing them together also has generated considerable interest.
“It doesn’t feel like a shipping container, though it has the same exact footprint,” said Stoltenow.
Getting the word out
Over the years, M T Housing’s most effective marketing has been word of mouth.
“Once people have a chance to visit one of our facilities, they contact us,” Forney said.
For example, a unit purchased by a construction company for use in Savoonga, Alaska piqued the interest of an officer of a nearby Native village corporation who saw the facility and contacted the company. He said he was interested in purchasing the units for use as a women’s shelter and a community center, Forney said.
M T Housing employs 14 year-round workers at its plant, located about 140 miles from Puget Sound, and provides additional temporary work when bigger projects require a ramp-up in production. In late June, the busy operation was completing two 24-person camps for mine projects in northern Alaska and putting finishing touches on two camps to be shipped to mine projects in British Columbia in July.
Stoltenow said a recent PR success for the company was a facility it built to house the security detail of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
“It (the facility) had 187 units and was three stories tall with 700 beds, and they used its kitchen to feed 1,500 people, three meals a day,” he explained.
After the Olympics, the facility was quickly resold and shipped to Williston, N.D. where it now serves as a camp in the area’s booming oil and gas sector.
Built to move
One of most overlooked aspects of temporary housing is the challenge of transporting the units to job or project sites, according to M T Housing.
The remarkable ease with which its units can be shipped – stacked eight containers high on a barge or ocean cargo ship – and installed on a simple foundation system are added benefits for the company’s customers.
The units require no wide-load permits or specialized transportation equipment. M T Housing also offers on-site technical support to assist with client-installed or -assembled facilities or complete ‘turn-key” installation and assembly.
Stoltenow said the company faced one of its more interesting logistical challenges when it shipped two basic units to northern Manitoba recently. To reach the destination, the housing traveled by truck and then rail before being loaded into the cargo bay of a Hercules aircraft in Frozen Lake, Man., for the final leg of the journey.
M T Housing is now focused on marketing its unique housing products in Alaska, Canada and the Lower 48. While its mining industry customer base is growing, most of its clients, so far, have been construction companies.
Knik Construction, for example, bought two of its camps recently, one for Kipnuk, Alaska and the other, which was shipped by barge to Kotzebue this summer, Stoltenow added.
