N.Y. Gets Its First Prefab Modular Multifamily Building

A multifamily building under construction in a working-class Manhattan neighborhood promises to offer a new avenue to creating moderate-income housing in urban areas.
In a first-of-its-kind building project for New York, the 28-apartment, seven-story structure is being put together with modular units that are constructed off site. It’s precise work, with the 56 modulars that make up this steel and concrete structure delivered by truck and then lifted by cranes and slowly and carefully set into place.
The modulars have been added at the rate of four a day, creating rental apartments that range in size from studios to three-bedrooms. The developers say the units will be priced to be affordable to those with moderate incomes. The work of stacking the modulars ended last week, completing the first part of this project in the neighborhood of Inwood in the upper tip of Manhattan. There now will be three months of finishing—called “zip up”—with the building scheduled to be ready for occupants in October.
Construction, including off-site assembly, will have taken 10 months—six months less than using traditional methods, say the developers.
Putting up housing this way is cheaper and faster and “can be an efficient way of supplying affordable housing in urban areas,” says the lead architect in the project, Peter Gluck of the Gluck+ architectural firm in New York. The vacant lots that litter many areas of New York and other cities are difficult and expensive to build on using traditional construction methods, he says. The main reason for that, he says, is “that with buildings tightly packed together, there is little room for construction projects to maneuver,” which drives up costs dramatically.
“If you are doing it the usual way, it’s tons of work to construct something like the building we are doing in Inwood. It takes as much effort as building something 10 times as big. That’s why in the old days in urban renewal projects, you knocked down the whole block, which destroyed neighborhoods,” says Gluck. Putting up buildings with prefabricated concrete and steel modules creates housing without such massive dislocation, he says. “We can upgrade the housing infrastructure in ways that enhance the environment and causes a minimum of disruption.” The world is urbanizing, he says, and “this method of construction offers an efficient way to build housing in our cities.”
In fact, says Gluck, “the city is gearing up for this type of construction by adapting their rules and specifications—the building codes—for off-site construction.” Earlier this year, New York chose the winner of a competition to design micro living spaces for a 55-unit apartment building to be constructed on the East Side of Manhattan, using prefabricated modulars. Another modular residential building, this one with 363 units, is getting underway in downtown Brooklyn, as part of the Atlantic Yards development project.
The 45-foot-long modulars for the Inwood building were constructed in a hangar-sized plant in Pennsylvania. This off-site construction is key to improving quality control, scheduling and supervision, says Gluck. “Usually, when you put up a building you have a bunch of guys flailing away in all kinds of conditions, in the rain or the freezing cold. There’re lots of decisions made on the fly too. In the plant where these modulars are made it’s warm, and there’s plenty of light. It’s much easier to work and much easier for managers to check the work.”
As regards funding these projects, he says banks may be wary of financing them because they are new, and “any bank hates to be the first one in. It’s not the way they are used to doing business.”
For the Inwood building, though, which is dubbed the Stack, the developers made it their business to put the banks in the picture. “It was a learning experience all around—for us, for the bankers,” says Kim Frank, one of the developers. “We took our lenders on a field trip to Pennsylvania to see the plant and meet the players and get everyone introduced to each other.”
It was important, says Frank, to make the point with lenders that though the approach is different, at the end of the day the project results in a building as good as or better than one built the traditional way. “The building methodology is different, but the result is the same. You have a steel and concrete structure.”
According to the other developer, Jeffrey Brown, “we discussed everything about the project with the bankers to get them comfortable with this new way of building. For one thing, modulars that are being built off site are looked at as stored materials. The lender can’t tour them exactly, as they would a building under construction the usual way. It’s something to get used to.”
One aspect of this type of project that will raise the comfort level of lenders, says Brown, “is that because there’s a lot of focus on doing things in advance, there’s much less done on the fly—and that makes for a better quality building and better scheduling.”
Those involved in the project say it costs less to build this way. “If all the variables of efficiency in cost and time are fully realized, the savings could be as much as 15% to 20%,” he says. “We see a bright future for modular projects.”