Solving San Francisco's Housing Shortage with Modular Construction

When San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee recently announced plans to prioritize affordable housing construction, many eyes turned to Seattle, a city that has spent the years since 2006 concentrating on new development. Scrutiny quickly showed that the significant increase in residential options has had a positive effect on that city's lodging costs. In fact, between 2007 and 2011, as the issuance of new construction permits rose in number, Seattle's average rental rates actually dropped.

Can San Francisco Repeat the Feat?

With all eyes focused on San Francisco, the question is; can they duplicate Seattle’s results of increased housing options and decreased lodging costs? One construction method available to the city is modular construction. San Francisco can utilize modular construction to add new housing developments in a shortened time period.

Benefits of Modular Apartment Construction

San Francisco can appreciate the many advantages that modular construction can provide to its residents. These include benefits such as greater reduced construction waste, speed of construction, and building flexibility. The disruption to the construction site is minimal, which translates to fewer cleanups after the building is in place. With modular construction, underground gas tanks, site grading and utilities are prepared at the same time the buildings are constructed at the factory. Construction delays are minimized because the buildings are constructed indoors. Although these buildings are built quickly, there is no sacrifice in quality. These modular buildings are constructed by highly trained workers and meet or exceed building codes and standards. Modular construction can complete developments 40% faster than traditional construction. Because of the shortened construction timeline, residents are able to occupy the building sooner, which allows investors to earn their ROI faster.

A Cutting-Edge Answer to San Francisco's Housing Shortage

Conveniently located in San Francisco's South of Market region is a modular apartment complex that features 23 units and boasts 295 square feet of fully equipped sustainable living space. The off-site manufacturer of this breakthrough development not only shortened construction time but also in this case, minimized expenses while lowering the project's impact on the surrounding neighborhood.
Currently this apartment complex is being leased to college students because of the affordability of each unit. With the simple living environment, this complex satisfies basic housing needs that are energy efficient with its solar heating and solar heated hot water. Today, the attractive structure stands to illustrate one viable and economical solution to San Francisco's affordable housing shortage.

Contact us to find out how modular construction can be used for your project.

Modular Construction is on the Rise in New York City

Imagine skyscrapers up to 32 stories tall being built in factories and erected in half the time of traditional buildings. It's happening right now in New York City. Modular construction is quickly becoming the preferred way of building both commercial and residential buildings in New York City.

New York is the most highly populated city in the United States today with an amazing 27,547 residents per square mile. That in itself creates a demand not only for more housing but space efficient, environmentally friendly and cost efficient housing. By utilizing the modular construction process, residents in New York can receive a high quality home that meets these needs.

The concept of building modular homes to accommodate almost 9 million New York residents isn't as new as one might think. However, the idea of building 30 story modular homes is a fairly new and an extremely innovative idea. Recently the Governor of New York approved the building of some 55 micro modular apartments in part of an effort to make room for the residents of New York. The micro apartments are smaller than most apartments in New York but their small and compact size will be an excellent choice for singles or couples without children. The micro modular studio apartments with 1 bath range in size from 250 to 370 sq. ft. Additionally, modular construction allowed the apartments to be constructed in a fraction of the time it would take for traditional construction, resulting in earlier occupancy and significant savings.

Micro apartments and other types of modular housing are built off-site much in the same way as traditional homes built on-site. The major difference about building homes inside a climate controlled building instead of outdoors is that it's cleaner for the environment, there are no delays due to poor weather conditions, entire buildings or major components can be reused and it is often more cost effective.

Once each of the modular homes or apartments is nearly complete in the factory, they are transported to the job site and installed before applying final interior and exterior finishes and connecting utilities. Because factory construction and site work occur simultaneously, New York residents can enjoy the benefits of a quality home, constructed much faster and efficiently.

More Units Going Up in a Snap

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Workers in Pennsylvania install walls for modular units, the building blocks for a seven-story apartment on a lot in Inwood.

A vacant lot on Broadway between Academy and 204th Streets in Inwood is littered with rubble and concrete pilings. But in a matter of weeks, this 50-foot-wide sand pit will be transformed into a seven-story apartment building, with finished bathrooms, maple cabinetry and 10 terraces. It is not a magic trick, but rather the result of modular, or prefabricated, construction.

Ryan Collerd for The New York Times

A worker in Pennsylvania welds together steel for the modular units.

A technique in which a building is manufactured piecemeal on a factory assembly line, trucked to the construction site and erected much the way Legos are, modular construction is gaining popularity across New York City. It is not new, but it has never gained much of a foothold here, in part because of its association with low-cost housing like mobile homes. That perception is changing; the city does not track modular data, but at least anecdotally, more developers and architects are embracing its ethos.

“Historically, people have had negative associations with modular construction,” said David J. Burney, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction, “and certainly within the design industry, it didn’t have much cachet. But there has been a sea change, and now there is much less of a distinction over whether a building has been assembled off-site or on-site.”

Ryan Collerd for The New York Times

The lot in Inwood, between Academy and 204th Streets, where the modular building will stand.

The announcement late last year that Forest City Ratnerwould use modular construction to build its first residential tower at the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn helped to shine a spotlight on this method of construction, and New York City, in announcing the winner of its first microunit apartment building design contest, has chosen a modular design.

The trend toward modular does pose issues, particularly for New York City’s powerful construction unions. It means exporting some construction jobs to factories outside New York, and while many modular factories are unionized, the employees tend to earn less than traditional construction workers. For its part, Forest City Ratner announced that the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York had created a modular division to help build its 32-story high-rise, and it joined with Skanska USA in creating a modular company at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“Any change in the way you do business involves some concerns and issues,” said Richard T. Anderson, the president of the New York Building Congress, a nonprofit organization that represents professionals in the construction industry. “If for New York City construction, business as usual is a challenge, you need to change some of the basic ingredients, and labor and management needs to address this.”

Gary LaBarbera, the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, declined to comment.

As for the $13 million Inwood project, it will consist of 56 modules that are under construction in Berwick, Pa. The modules will be combined to create 28 apartments: 6 studios, 6 one-bedrooms, 14 two-bedrooms and 2 three-bedrooms. Twenty percent of the rentals will rent below market rate, and the project, which is scheduled to open this summer, will also include 3,600 square feet of ground-floor retail space.

While the facades of modular buildings can be anything from red brick to glass, “we chose to express the stacked modules,” Thomas Gluck, a principal of the architecture firm Gluck+, said in describing the boxy design. The building, in homage to its origin, is named Broadway Stack.

Jeffrey M. Brown, the chief executive of Brown Hill Development of Huntingdon, Pa., which is building the project with Kim Frank, the owner of the real estate finance company MCA, said, “We always wanted to use modular construction for this project.”

The two acquired the property in 2008 and have been working from the outset with Gluck+, which also has an ownership stake.

It is taking four months to manufacture the modules, during which time the team has been building the foundation at the site. “The factory has been able to create 28,000 square feet of residential space in the same amount of time it has taken us to construct 6,000 square feet of cellar space,” Mr. Gluck said.

On successive nights beginning in early April, the modules, which have steel and concrete frames, will be trucked four to five at a time to the building site from the factory.

On each of the following mornings for about four weeks, an enormous crane will stack the modules. Workers will then “zip” them up, connecting one to the next, and to the building’s plumbing and electrical systems.

The project is expected to take 9 months from start to finish, compared with 16 to 18 months if construction had been done on-site. “Because it takes half the time,” Ms. Frank said, “we can rent out the units and generate income much quicker, and the carrying costs are lower.”

Mr. Brown concurred, pointing out that if traditional on-site construction had been used, the project would have cost an additional 10 percent to 20 percent.

Because modular units are built on an assembly line — which is a quarter-mile in length at the Pennsylvania factory — there are constraints, including having to choose the paint colors, finishes, appliances and every other detail upfront. It is also impossible to make substantial changes partway through the construction, and because each module must be structurally sound, the walls and floors of the buildings tend to be thicker than in on-site construction.

There are other differences as well, said Peter L. Gluck, another principal of Gluck+, who began designing and building modular projects in the 1960s. “In the first three weeks of production they manufacture one entire module, which is basically like getting to see a full-scale mock-up of your project,” he said. “We can watch the entire building process and do quality control, correcting something immediately.”

With traditional construction, oversight is more time-consuming because someone must be on the site at all times to catch mistakes. “With prefab,” said Peter Gluck, “everything is done the same, so once we make a fix, it is fixed permanently.”

Also, because construction takes place indoors, there are no delays or damages to the material from inclement weather.

Modular construction may provide sustainability benefits, too. “We can recycle everything, all of the packaging materials, the gypsum, every piece of steel,” said Tom O’Hara, the director of business development at the Capsys Corporation, a modular builder based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, “because none of our products get wet or are affected by the elements.”

DeLuxe Building Systems, which has been actively pursuing New York City developers, has several projects in the works, including an 11-story Harlem rental in the pre-construction phase; it is also in discussions with a developer of two 24-story rental towers.

“We are starting to hear from a lot of developers about modular building,” said Stephen G. Kliegerman, the president of Halstead Property Development Marketing, which was hired to market a 12-story modular rental building in Manhattan south of 96th Street.

Most of the modular projects in the works are rentals. “It is still relatively untested,” Mr. Kliegerman said, “so there needs to be some kind of track record before developers will feel comfortable using it to build condominiums.”

Mr. O’Hara of Capsys said his firm was “getting a dozen calls a week from developers who want to explore what is, for them, a new type of technology.” He added, “There is a vibrancy in the air now that we haven’t felt in a long time.”

Written By: Julie Satow

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/realestate/inwood-prefab-homes-win-converts-in-new-york.html?_r=0

Research Proclaims MH Rising

As PRWeb informs MHProNews, according to market research firm Global Industry Analysts, Inc. (GIA), shipments of prefabricated homes are expected to reach 112,000 units by 2018 in the U.S. as the resurgence in housing and construction activity increases. 

The study covers manufactured, modular, panelized, and precut housing, but the manufactured housing segment comprises over half of the total shipments. Single-section growth of manufactured homes is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.9 percent for the next five years. While the rising demand for prefab housing is coming from the baby boomers, it is also driven by environmental awareness from those desiring eco-friendly and energy efficient homes which are being incorporated into factory-built product. 

Growth in this market in the U.S. has been stymied by the lack of financial support and incentives from the federal government, as well as by the ‘trailer park’ mentality long associated with the industry as a whole.

Photo credit: Chris Butler/Idaho Statesman

Source: http://www.mhmarketingsalesmanagement.com/blogs/daily-business-news/research-proclaims-mh-rising/

Written By: Matthew Silver

What's the Deal With Atlantic Yards' Modular Construction?

This week, Forest City Ratner broke ground on the next phase of the Atlantic Yards, a 32-story residential tower known as B2, which will be the world's tallest modular building. It will have 363 residential units and 4,000 square feet of retail space, which is great and all, but what exactly does modular construction entail? To get some answers, Curbed spoke with John Dolan, a project executive at Skanska USA Inc., the general contractor on the project, who worked with SHoP Architects, structural engineer Arup, and consultant Xsite Modular.

How does prefabricated construction work?
Much of what is happening today began 20 years ago. We're pre-manufacturing elements of the building off-site, whether it's a pump, piping or valve that that may be put on a truck, shipped to a job site, taken off a crane or a forklift, bolted down to a floor and connected to other pre-manufactured elements. That has been going on for years.

This is a much bigger project. What's different?
We're taking a frame, we're calling it a chassis, our largest is 36 feet long by 14 feet wide and 10-foot tall, a steel tubular frame that will house all the elements of a single studio apartment or a portion of a multi-room apartment. We have drywall framing, the light fixtures, all the appliances and all the details in bathrooms, down to the toilet paper holders on the wall, in the factory, packaged up and shipped over. The chassis are built at steel fabricators manufacturers. They'll ship those to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and then to Atlantic Yards. For the most part, one chassis will be on one truck. In some cases, two small chassis will be on one truck.

How much do you save compared to conventional construction? How much faster is it?
We estimated that it's around 12 to 15 percent in savings based what we think our effectiveness will be. We hope it'll be better than that. It does provide tangible savings, because we're producing it around four months faster than conventional construction. We expect to be done in 18 months. The conventional construction would have been 24 months.

How does the prefabricated structure compare to a normal building?
There is a denser collection of material. The overall building is lighter. Our column spacing is tighter than the normal 25 by 25-foot column grid. Our column grid is every 14 feet, but I don't want that to sound like a detriment. It's very strategically laid out so the columns are not noticeable. Most of the transitions are done in the doorway and archway. You don't see the columns; you don't know the steel columns are in the walls, although they may be wider. It's not as noticeable because we have laid out the apartment where they're concealed inside the wall.

How has new technology helped this process?
We have relied heavily on 3D modeling in the past to ensure our mechanical and electrical piping all had space. This particular project is taking the modeling effort to a new level. Everything that will be produced in a factory will be on a drawing. What we don't want to have happen is have factory production stop to try to find the dimension for something like a light switch. Everything has to be done in the model.

What impact will prefabrication have on the construction industry?
New York City building trade unions have worked very closely with Forest City Ratner and Skanska. I've worked with unions throughout my 30-year career. It’s an opportunity to evolve. We all want it to pay the bills. I think it's better for the industry that we find strategies to build elements and entire projects offsite to minimize the amount of construction that occurs on the work site. The Atlantic Yards site is very difficult to navigate around. We're reducing the amount of activity. There will be fewer trucks.

Have you done any modular buildings before?
Skanska has already completed a modular data center up in Quebec, Canada for Telus, a communications company. It was partially manufactured in Danbury, Connecticut by a mechanical contractor. Some of the technical aspects of the data center were shipped out from Wisconsin. We're building a second data center in British Columbia right now, same process. We've also done modular in Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.

What's your outlook for the future of prefabconstruction?
This will be the first of six million square feet that Forest City Ratner has committed to the city of New York. We hope this will be something we can do around the country. As a national builder, we are in nearly every state and this is a valuable system for any client. I'm expecting to go beyond the borders of New York and New Jersey.

—Roland Li
Interview has been edited and condensed.

Source: http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2012/12/19/whats_the_deal_with_atlantic_yards_modular_construction.php

Modular Homes: Consumers Can Take Advantage of off-Season Construction Costs

Boston, MA -- (SBWIRE) -- 11/15/2012 -- A cold Massachusetts winter is no reason to delay having your dream home built. Yes, even in the extreme temperatures a modular home can be constructed quickly and efficiently for you. There is no reason to wait until spring to build, and risk paying higher prices or interest rates. A modular home offers more benefits than just being able to purchase more home for your money, it offers the ability to build your home at any given time.

ModularHomesNetwork.com is focused on educating consumers on the advantages offered by Modular Housing. The revolution of the modular construction method means that consumers can have a better built, lower cost home option build in the climate controlled settings of a factory that is then delivered to a building site on the schedule that they need. No longer are they tied to the traditional seasonal cycle that leaves them hostage to the seasonal demand of regular contractor’s schedule. A modular home can be built year round and takes advantage of the off season costs that are likely lower.

Look at some of the facts

- Modular homes are constructed in an environmentally protected factory. There are no reasons for weather delays or for production to stop because of snow. The weather proof manufacturing process also ensures that your homes skeleton will remain free from any weather induced damage.

- Once your new home arrives to the site where it is to be constructed the final assembly can be performed at record speeds. Most of the work has already been completed; the home just needs to be secured. Being able to work at this fast of a pace, as opposed to building the home from the ground up, ensures that the home will become weather tight in a very quick time frame.

- Winter time is the off season and this could result in additional savings to you. It is already a common fact that you will be able to purchase a larger home with more amenities when you buy a modular home. On average a modular home can cost almost 30% less than a stick built home, a considerable savings. With the winter slow down, and builders hurting for business, you will be able to negotiate larger deals or take advantage of specials they may be offering.

Modular homes are not mobile homes. They do not have wheels, they cannot be moved once secured to the site and they do not fall apart when the first wind comes through. What modular homes do offer is a great way to build your own home in an economically fashion and in the manner you desire. It provides you a way to build, even during inclement weather when all other construction has stopped, and it allows you to be the deciding factor as to when you want to move. With interest rates so incredibly low, and the slow season approaching for builders, no one should pass this opportunity of a lifetime.

Consumers in Texas, California, Louisiana and Florida may have the luxury of not suffering through the winter season. But for the rest of us, whether it be Michigan, Connecticut, Minnesota, or any of cold New England, a modular constructed home may be the best solution. And after your new home is constructed, you can call your friends with your iPhone and sing the joys of your new home like a contestant on ‘The Voice’.

About Modular Homes
ModularHomesNetwork.com (http://www.modularhomesnetwork.com) is a leading expert on the Modular Homes Industry, offering consumer resources on plans, pricing and builder resources. We offer services throughout the U.S. with a goal to help our customers find the greatest value for their budget.

Source: Modular Homes Network

World's Tallest Modular Building

A combination of mystical views and practical thinking has led to the creation of the world’s tallest modular building. Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, New York, has been selected as the site where a 32-story, 348,000 sq. ft. modular apartment tower named “B2” will be built. There is no date selected yet for construction to begin, but the estimated time it will take to construct the finished product is rumored to be anywhere from 2 to 6 months from start to finish. One of the most incredible feats to be accomplished was successful negotiation with the unions on integrating a new concept into the modular building industry.

Engineers were able to use 3-dimensional computer models to incorporate lateral bracing within the structure to ensure the integrity of the project. Great care is being taken to allocate large areas to fireproofing materials that will protect the future residents. Soundproofing measures are factored into the construction and there is an overall sense of safety being a paramount issue. Given the hype surrounding the announcement of this project, future buildings of all types could be affected forever based on the success or failure of the B2 project. Touted as a complete city within one building this modular apartment tower can serve approximately 100,000 residents within its modular walls. The building will also give residents access to public spaces such as a fitness center, bike storage, a resident lounge, game room, yoga/dance studio and a roof terrace.

The advantages for embracing modular creations are enormous. Most of the construction takes place at an off-site factory allowing for better quality control. Traditionally built hotels and apartment buildings often have hidden flaws that have led to headline disasters. Weather conditions affect key components of a building constructed from the ground up; concrete may not settle correctly due to time factors. The speed at which a modular building can be built helps avoid many problems associated with traditional construction methods.

Large structures that are already in place can integrate any additions or expansions with the use of modular construction. The exterior finish on a modular addition can be adapted to match the existing structure so there is a seamless integration.

Modular construction also allows little disruption to the lives of current residents or guests. It is a huge enticement for companies needing to expand while maintaining current revenues without interruption because the majority of construction takes place off-site.

Upon completion, B2 will dwarf the current world’s tallest modular building, a 25 story-housing unit completed in Manchester, England in 1996. B2 will also gain the distinction of being the second tallest building in the world, behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, built with traditional construction.

America has a long history of prefab construction. From the “Lincoln Logs” cabins that could be ordered by catalog, to the barn raising traditions of 19th century, we have displayed an aptitude for creatively constructing parts of dwellings before fitting those parts together to complete the whole building. The future of building will be determined during the prefab construction of B2 as it is constructed module by module.