Wanona Satcher wants to turn unused shipping containers into mini-affordable housing units—and she’s forming a nonprofit and for-profit to do so.

Satcher’s plan is for her  one-year-old nonprofit, called Rejuve, to upcycle and repurpose some of the more than 760,000 shipping containers sitting idly at ports and other places due to lack of demand, then place them in abandoned lots and other blighted properties where there’s already the utility infrastructure in place for a dwelling. She calls them Plug-in-Pods. Satcher decided to go with a nonprofit first so she could attract grant money.

Wanona Satcher (Photo credit: Zoë Pictures)

Rejuv LLC, the for-profit, which is yet to be formed, will provide real estate development, landscape architecture, master planning and urban design services, plus designing and building shipping container-based spaces for more-affluent homes and businesses. A portion of revenues will support the nonprofit.

Satcher’s ultimate mission is to find ways to improve the condition of low-income communities that could be expanded easily and boost employment and entrepreneurial opportunities. It’s just, as she looked into the possibility over a period of two or three years, turning the 320-square-foot and 640-square-foot containers into homes increasingly seemed to her to be the perfect solution. “Shipping containers just happen to my tool of choice,” she says.

The containers, she says, are inexpensive to buy--$3,000 tops. And she’ll keep costs down further by reusing, instead of rebuilding them. Plus, the venture will create construction jobs, stimulate the local economy and encourage entrepreneurship. She’s also talking about using the pods to house temporary pop-up health clinics in low-income areas.

To ensure that developers don’t grab up the land at some point and turn it into, say, luxury housing, another part of the plan is to work with local community development corporations and private donors to acquire the properties and set up land trusts that will allow the communities to retain ownership in perpetuity.

The first location will be close to home—in the backyard of Satcher’s home in Atlanta. She’s hoping to finance that partially through a crowdfunding campaign on the newly launched, Kickstarter-style iFundWomen.com site, with a goal of raising $20,000. (So far, she’s attracted $4,745.00, with 50 days to go).

Satcher was working for the City of Durham, NC, as manager of the Durham Urban Innovation Center, which, she says she developed as a city employee in 2012. While running that venture, she says she worked with urban farmers, collaborated with other city and county staff, as well as the county health department for seniors, and developed small neighborhood revitalization plans. It was during that time  that she participated in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge. "One question they asked was, how do you connect people who need resources to those who have resources in a way that’s most efficient,” she says. Ultimately, re-purposing shipping containers was her answer.