I am mostly wondering how to figure out where I could potentially build a container home.
drive around. look for yards full of old cars just deteriorating.
Look at counties which are basically declining rural areas. You build out in the country and those counties often don’t have zoning and building codes.
Lincoln County Missouri, NW of St Louis, has no zoning at all. Buy a few acres and do as you wish.
Why do you think a container home would violate zoning codes? It presumably would be a residential use in residential zone, with the required minimum setbacks from lot lines, no larger than the maximum FAR.
County beauracrats hate anything weird. They would make an architect sign off at the very least. And then make all kinds of demands. And probably would argue that it is a mobile home even after that.
As for most effecient ways for finding out about local codes…a message board like this one.
A lot of Texas is pretty lenient. Some contractor that just moved there told me when he showed up with the plans to his new house they just looked at funny, and said it was his property and he didn’t need to be bothering them about it. Lots of people in Humboldt county get away with crazy stuff by calling it an agricultural building, because ag buildings are unregulated. A lot of Oregon is like this too. Also New Mexico is fairly accepting of strange stuff because Adobe and straw bale are already written into the code there.
I will watch this thread closely because I am tired of working on my stupid ancient house and want to go somewhere that will let me live in a yurt. Or maybe two yurts connected by a container…
A container home violates zoning codes for most areas; there is no question about that.
Is a container pretty much tornado proof?
This webpage talks of making a list of all counties in the US where no building permits are needed. Perhaps it is already done and is somewhere else on the site. Lots of good comments there in any case.
http://www.naturalbuildingblog.com/counties-with-few-or-no-building-codes/
A shipping container bolted to some concrete would be fully tornado proof. One without a foundation …might go for a ride.
I’m gonna suspect that for most areas it’d be more a matter of violating building codes than violating zoning rules. Those are two very different bodies of law and practice.
And where building codes are extant and enforced, they tend to be of the form “this, this, and this are permitted. All else is prohibited.” In which case absent specific approval for container-based construction it’d be prohibited.
Again I’m talking about what I believe to be the typical case in most of non-rural USA. Exceptions will exist in all directions.
How so? What provision would it violate?
Maybe it is more accurate to say building codes. For starters, lots of places require a minimum square footage for a dwelling that would be larger than a single container. Beyond that, I think LSL Guy describes the situation correctly, basically a container home would be outside of what is allowed on many different fronts.
I see the issue with building codes, but the OP specifically asked about zoning codes.
By state law, Texas Counties have no zoning power. Cities do, but some (famously, Houston) refuse to.
Fortunately the point of my OP seems to have been generally understood by most folks; but for the sake of clarity what I meant to ask is where can I build a container home legally. Due to my ignorance of the appropriate terminology I did not properly phrase the question. My only concern is what is the most efficient way to obtain clear information about where I can build and live in such a home.
there can be prohibitions in zoning ordinances about using things for dwellings, like not using semi trailers for homes.
I live in a yurt in Delta County, Colorado! Just set it up on some land. There are no building codes or permits required in Delta County. The awesome thing is there are a lot of yurt manufactures in Colorado so I just looked at local places and it was easy to set up. Got mine from Weatherport.
I heard about connecting yurts but I don’t really need the space. Maybe I’ll do that and in the other I’ll put in a wood fired hot tub. 
In some of the field camps I’ve worked the common way to build a container home was to space two containers about 10 or 15 feet apart, build a single roof covering both containers, and build a deck in between. It gave you a covered deck and one container for the kitchen/family room and the other for bedrooms.
My sister used to be an accountant. She worked on liquidating a large container leasing company and had to dispose of a number (some hundreds) of shipping containers.
A company in the SE of England bought a lot of them with the intention of converting them into instant homes for the Third World (ie - Africa). They cut windows and doors, fitted plumbing and wiring for electricity. They made them modular so that they could be joined (an L shape was popular) or stacked with an outside stair. Apparently they can be found in permanent use in several West Coast African countries.
Although containers make great shipping contrainers, they aren’t exceptionally good as kit homes. The walls are made to the cheapest, minimum strength/sfiffness required, and when you cut holes in them they loose their strength and stiffness.
If you don’t cut holes in them, they aren’t ventilated, and the condensate runs down the walls. Also, a thin sheet of corrigated iron has poor thermal properties, so you wake up freezing and wet.