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.
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Ryan Collerd for The New York Times
A worker in Pennsylvania welds together steel for the modular units.
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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.”
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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
People invest in real estate and multi-family housing developments because they are known for their cash flow capabilities. These
properties are also well known for the longer return on their investment
because of the amount of time it takes to build. 
