
Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buildings - johnny313
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/business/economy/modular-housing.html
======
ohazi
I find it hilarious that a CA company is leading the charge in new, efficient,
high-quality pre-fab design and construction. These units are going to improve
construction quality and lower costs in every state _except_ CA, thanks to our
asinine zoning laws.

~~~
tomjakubowski
What are the state zoning laws? As far as I know, the state constitution
leaves zoning as an issue for the cities/counties to handle. Is that your beef
or are there laws on the books I'm ignorant of?

~~~
bobthepanda
The issue is that regional concerns (there is not enough housing in the
region) do not mesh well with local control. Every locality thinks that
everyone _else_ should relieve the burden of housing because they are already
"crowded" and new residents mean more money needed for services, which is a
hard ask in a place like CA where raising local taxes is fiendishly difficult.

If _all_ the localities in a region, or even most of them, act this way, the
end result is a housing shortage even when the economy is barely chugging
along.

~~~
njoro
Personally I wouldn't mind the Bay Area looking like Shenzhen, but I don't
understand why people think that anything is going to change. Housing and
education are prime assets in the new information based society and economy.
People aren't going to share that anymore than natural resources, stocks,
bitcoins or domains. Regardless of the larger consequences.

~~~
adrianratnapala
> People aren't going to share ...

It's more complicated than just sharing.

It's not about whether you have to let people come and live on your own
property. It's about whether your neighbour may subdivide _her_ own property
for a profit. Collectively, owners have an incentive to stop her; but
individual incentives are mixed.

We can see how the politics of that tension is working out right now. But how
can anyone tell how it will play out in the future?

------
Joeri
I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke. All that
pouring and sawing and drilling and slathering of raw materials to do one-off
designs for houses that are then filled with standardized ikea furniture which
fits the custom room shape poorly. Manual labor is too costly for such a
bespoke approach. Either we make carpenter and bricklayer robots to do the
bespoke work cheaply, or we build homes from standardized parts.

~~~
megaman22
It's not super expensive or time-consuming to throw up a standard, American
stick-built house. Once you have a foundation poured, you can do all the
framing, sheathe it, roof it, and have it ready for finish work in a week with
a handful of people. What takes forever and a day is the signoffs, and waiting
for all the deliveries and third-parties to show up and do their piece. And
then all the fiddly stuff inside...

~~~
derefr
Sure, that's sensible; a _house_ is at this point almost an artisanal good,
like a wicker chair. Something people buy to go against the grain of
standardization and conformity.

But isn't it weird that there aren't more copy-and-paste condo buildings?
Maybe not even in the same city—you don't want a Brasilia[1]. But, once you've
gotten an architect to _design_ a large building, why not get N times the
materials, and then build the same building in as many cities as are
compatible with the building codes it was designed under?

[1]
[http://thomaslockehobbs.com/brasilia/index.html](http://thomaslockehobbs.com/brasilia/index.html)

~~~
osdiab
China, HK, Singapore have a lot of copy paste buildings lined up next to each
other, which I find pretty odd to look at and dehumanizing/alienating to be
surrounded by (though probably very efficient to build, and it seems like
Chinese people don't mind too much). You'd see them as soon as you left the
airport if you visit there sometime.

I found many cities in China in particular look very similar to one another in
a not great way because of similar architectural choices including copy paste
buildings, which apparently the government has noticed—I can't find the
article about it but the central government is making moves to get Chinese
cities to stop being built in exactly the same way/destroy and replace too
much of their historic buildings with culturally diverse architecture.

Not to say we shouldn't do what you're saying, but if we do it we should
probably do it in a way that doesn't make all our cities too generic.

~~~
collyw
Make they come to the west and think all our housing looks the same.

------
bane
I think it's very interesting how prefab construction seems to pop up from
time to time in the media. I grew up in a prefab house, trucked to the
property in two halves and bolted together on a poured concrete foundation --
it's incredibly common.

Apartment blocks however, they seem to be locked in a perpetual demonstrator
state. One, maybe two prefab buildings will go up, and then no more,
eliminating the point of the effort. All kinds of stats will be provided,
"built in 30 days", "providing housing for 100 families" and so on. Decades
later they'll lay forgotten, or in disrepair, or make for interesting
background scenery in dystopian cinema.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower)

It seems that when populations have to have lots of housing, now and fast,
they go more with some kind of semi-prefabbed mobile factory approaches and
stamp the buildings out on site. [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/wn20...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/wn20130918n2a-870x580.jpg)

My guess is that it's a logistics thing. You can more efficiently move 10,000
tons of concrete and rebar to a site packed in sacks and bound in sets, on
fewer trucks and in less space, than you can move the same in prefabbed boxes
full of mostly empty air. Converting that raw material into the same boxes of
air isn't particularly complicated or difficult and can be done at high
quality on site anyways, and now you also don't have to pay to have a factory
and factory workers.

~~~
Kagerjay
Its not just a logistics thing. Prefab components are mostly used for faster
RoI by building quicker.

A good example of a real estate holdings company using prefab construction is
mcdonalds, wawa, etc. These establishments have the same churn and burn
formula. From start to finish, some of these stores can be completed in a
little under a month from start of construction to open time. It makes sense
for them to spend more money on prefab components. Opening sooner means faster
revenue streams. Not only that, if you open in a popular area, rent/land is
very high. Where I live the average rent for a store is maybe $3000 a month
for a 1500 square foot area but a new chipotle in my town opened up an area
with a rent of about $8000.

Your traditional real estate development takes much longer than this though.
They pay for cheaper raw materials instead, as its easier to work with for
each houses need. They dont have a streamlined sysyem setup for needing prefab
components.

~~~
DrScump

      Prefab components are mostly used for faster RoI by building quicker
    

... or by displacing work to places where labor and materials are cheaper
(even if mainly due to poor QC and/or compromised worker safety).

A classic example of this was the imported prefab segments of the New Bay
Bridge, which costs tens (hundreds?) of millions in rework costs and who-
knows-how-many remaining _unfixed_ defects.

~~~
Kagerjay
I overstated myself here. What I meant is that for residential / small -
midsized commercial buildings only, QC/defects are not as large as a concern.

Prefab components I was thinking about was prefab wall / roof / floor trusses
like these [http://www.buildwithbmc.com/bmc/Products/Trusses%2C-I-
Joists...](http://www.buildwithbmc.com/bmc/Products/Trusses%2C-I-
Joists-%26-Engineered-Lumber/Trusses-%26-Prefabricated-Wall-Panels/c/Trusses-
Prefabricated-Wall-Panels)

Bridges are a different story all together.

------
drawkbox
Reminds me of _Sears Catalog Home_ prefabricated homes. [1][2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home)

[2]
[http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm](http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm)

------
reeddavid
Quality prefabricated homes and apartments are a great idea. There's a
negative association with prefabricated homes, but I've seen a lot of newer
companies that seem to be focusing on quality and efficiency, often targeting
the higher end of the market.

And lots of new homes built on-site are of very poor quality these days:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-
live/wp/2017/05...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-
live/wp/2017/05/23/new-home-build-quality-standards-are-slipping-and-how-you-
can-protect-yourself)

This approach doesn't seem like a solution to affordable housing, even though
many of these companies use that concept in their marketing.

In the least affordable housing markets with worsening trends, including
Seattle and San Francisco, construction cost is a tiny fraction of the
problem.

Efficient, prefabricated housing isn't going to make housing meaningfully more
affordable in places where the majority of the cost of a dwelling is its land.

~~~
pxeboot
The article claims a per unit cost of almost $800k in SF. Cheaper,
prefabricated units could make a significant difference here.

~~~
davmre
That per-unit development cost is almost certainly including the cost of
acquiring the land. Labor in SF is expensive, but not _that_ expensive.

~~~
epistasis
Labor is hugely under supplied in SF. I hear it's really hard to get on a
contractor's docket these days without a really big project.

------
emptybits
Here in Vancouver, we have been building apartments to house homeless using
modular construction.

[http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/temporary-modular-
housin...](http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/temporary-modular-housing.aspx)

Start-to-finish I believe the timeframe is about six months and one of the
benefits of modular is that they can reconfigure or move these buildings in
several years as needs and neighbourhoods change.

------
edmundhuber
The problem is the price of buildable land, not the buildings on it.

~~~
siliconunit
Absolutely, land estate prices are totally insane in the more gentrified
areas. The building itself is nearly irrelevant, see Vancouver rare land plots
for measure... or most of the UK. What is in dire need is a fundamental
legislation change, where the entirety of the real estate is no longer a
market open to speculation, but a fundamental right of the individual and is
well proportioned to _any_ income range within a very reasonable 2:1 ratio and
this even if it means depricing the already bought properties and cutting
corporations out of the building business and of course limiting the amount of
houses in possession to a single individual to maybe 2 and eliminate
speculators/investors completely.

~~~
ksec
Hong Kong has been breaking records after records in the most unaffordable
places on earth to live, ranked by Median Income and Median Price of Housing.

Agreed. I think the solution is, Property should not be an investment vehicle.
At least it should be taxed and regulated. Although another / the major reason
to what we have now is QE, pushing asset prices up.

------
danschumann
What I want is an MVP house (room + bathroom + kitchen), which I can expand (
extra rooms, extra bathrooms, etc ). Normally with construction, when you add
stuff, you need to break stuff, but if there could be a modular housing system
that would let you expand without destruction, while being competitively
priced, I'd do that.

In Elon Musk fashion, it would have to be better than a normal house, right? A
modular house ( like a mobile home ), which is expandable, which is
simultaneously better than a normal house. Maybe for my next startup idea (
since this is a problem I have and I would use ). The end goal would be a
transition from a tiny house to a mansion, with each state being as good as a
comparable house, and about as cheap. Maybe some panels they could sell back?

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Part of the problem is the foundation. You either need to pour a large
foundation ahead of time (that you won't use for a while) or pour it as you
go. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it does make it more difficult.
Although if you decided to build up instead, by just adding more floors you
could avoid that problem.

~~~
oh_sigh
Is pouring more foundation next to existing foundation problematic and
difficult, or is it just more expense to get the concrete guys back out to do
more work?

~~~
yrb
It can actually be very problematic and difficult, depending how how easy the
new slab location is to access now that you have a building in the way and
presumably landscaping you want to preserve. This can end up adding a
considerable amount of expense to a job compared to a bare site.

------
sjg007
Great idea.. still unlikely to bring down rent prices I assume without zoning
changes.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
In some cases, your conclusion is correct while the problem is completely
different. I live in a college town, where rent and housing prices obey
different laws of economics.

Unlike the Bay Area, a brisk 15 minutes drive in any direction will bring you
to dirt cheap rural property, but because a huuuuuuge proportion of renters
are college students, they tend to live in the city and put the rent on their
student loans instead of moving further out and spending time (and money, on a
car) commuting. It’s not as if a college student is going to throw in their
hands and say “well, I could get an Ivy League degree at the school I was
accepted to, or I could get a second-Tier degree somewhere else and pay half
the rent.”

Case in point, Ithaca’s Collegetown neighborhood used to be a sleepy community
of large rental houses, but over the last 20 years it’s been heavily developed
into very large, tall apartment blocks, all while Cornell built massive
developments of dorms and grad student housing complexes. And rents just keep
climbing higher and higher...

~~~
osdiab
I've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short
drives in any direction can be much cheaper. Students seem to be mostly in
student housing anyway, and anybody who lives there in any other capacity
probably has a car, is it just prestige of being there that pumps up the rent?

~~~
jseliger
_I 've always been surprised by how expensive Princeton is even though short
drives in any direction can be much cheaper_

AAA estimates the TCO of a car to be $8,500/yr:
[https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-
costs](https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs).

Even if you're only "a short drive away," you then have to pay for parking on
or near campus, which is likely dear:
[https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-
of-f...](https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-free-
parking).

Finally, commuting sucks:
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-
back...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back-again)
from a social and psychological perspective. People love living around other
people who can they chat with and befriend; that's why current zoning laws
prohibiting such developments are so pernicious.

------
mdjasper
And have been since the 60's. Here an interesting article about one building,
modularly constructed for 1968 World's Fair:
[https://www.mysanantonio.com/150years/major-
stories/article/...](https://www.mysanantonio.com/150years/major-
stories/article/How-a-gamble-changed-the-San-Antonio-skyline-6105562.php)

And a fascinating documentary
[https://youtu.be/D7shgCkCfhU?t=573](https://youtu.be/D7shgCkCfhU?t=573). I've
skipped to the fun part with people riding their hotel rooms up to the
building on a crane... but the whole thing is worth a watch if you've got the
time.

~~~
kazen44
This is just "plattenbau" but done by californians?

Like, prefab highrise has existed for more then 60 years, it is not a new
thing?

~~~
notahacker
The Plattenbau were mostly composed of system built concrete panels and frames
assembled into rooms onsite, with only the small bathrooms being delivered to
site as complete units.

These appear to be structures composed entirely of stacked full-size room unit
completed before site delivery and winched into place; but that technique's
been around (especially in the hotel industry) for a good while too, although
it's only in the last 20 years people have started to build structures of over
10 storeys that way

Nothing's ever truly new. The Romans used prefabricated elements to speed up
fort construction in the first century AD.

------
maerF0x0
China has been able to do this for at least 7 yrs now. 30 Story building in 15
days.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-
MQM9vY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY)

~~~
petra
Does anybody know how's the quality of that building ?

~~~
knuththetruth
Here's a closer look at the building:

[https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/close-look-
bro...](https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/close-look-broad-
sustainable-buildings-prefab-hotels.html)

------
jmkb
The New York City Office of Emergency Management has a "pre-fab brownstone"
demo assembled in downtown Brooklyn. They're hoping to be able to relocate
entire neighborhoods when another event like Sandy hits.

[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6996729,-73.9898138,3a,65.6y...](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6996729,-73.9898138,3a,65.6y,88.6h,94.55t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s0VN2kZuJCN_tD-9RIK0_5A!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D0VN2kZuJCN_tD-9RIK0_5A%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D6.3159122%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192)

------
jpao79
It's also gaining popularity in the hotel industry. Inspiring video:
[http://www.guerdonmodularbuildings.com/modular-now-
marriotts...](http://www.guerdonmodularbuildings.com/modular-now-marriotts-
modular-initiative/)

It has many benefits for the construction teams. They can work in a controlled
environment, and focus on technical skills versus getting through urban
commutes, live in lower cost of living areas (in this case Idaho), all the
tools/materials are there, have quality assurance processes, etc.

I think the key is its for condos/apartments which will look virtually
indistinguishable from a conventional apartment building, then you escape the
stigma of mobile trailer home.

~~~
ksec
Thanks for the Video Link. It answer a lot of the question I had previously.

One problem I thought that was not solved were finishing. It turns out they
actually do all the finishing before it is shipped. And because the finishing,
construction, are all done indoor and in house, my guess is that with Air
Condition they will / could work much faster, higher efficiency, and more
importantly, there should be less sloppiness.

But then Another question I had as shown in the video, wouldn't all the room
be limited by the 40Ft Container Size that fits in the truck?

How much of those labour, once moved indoor, could be full automated?

Can you built a 50 floor + building / Hotel with these modular tech? How does
it work in area where you have special construction requirement like earth
quake zone.

Are the factory mobilise? i.e, Assuming this take mainstream, would a
manufacture of those unit have to ship 100s of containers across the country
to have these fitted? Because all the time saved are now bottlenecked by
transportation of these blocks. Are we going to ship them overseas?

Making the hotel from 2 years to 9 months sounds like a big Win. But in places
like China or Japan. No one has 9 month to wait for a construction. China has
a 30 floor hotel built from Zero to fully working hotel in less then 3 months.

Other then time and quality, are there any actual cost savings?

~~~
yrb
Depending on how you measure a lot of prefab construction you don't save time
overall (design to finished) or end up with better quality. You also tend to
up with buildings that will fail earlier due to having a lot more of the most
risky components of any built form, joints.

I have hope that as designers and tools get better at dealing with the
connection detailing and with material/assembly tolerances it will lead to
better outcomes in the future.

I would really recommend watching "The Building Science of Prefabricated
Construction". It does a good job of going over the realities of this form of
construction.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIeZlCfweMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIeZlCfweMo)

------
kpil
I think that maybe the last thing humanity needs is high density- low quality-
apartment blocks, built in ill-planned areas that promotes anonymity and does
not promote socially sound communities.

Especially when sold at a high margin, because land value is high.

------
gondo
personally, I don't consider those USA wooden houses to be a real house.

there is a company in UAE doing this for quite some time from concrete:
[http://www.gulfprecast.ae/](http://www.gulfprecast.ae/)

~~~
whatsstolat
A real house provides safe shelter for its occupants. Being made of wood don't
matter

------
Dowwie
There already are prefab towers in Brooklyn, some prefabbed in warehouse(s)
somewhere in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Here's one of the older stories:
[https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131211/navy-
yard/worlds-t...](https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131211/navy-yard/worlds-
tallest-prefab-building-leads-nycs-boom-modular-housing/)

I haven't been closely following the Atlantic Yards project, but to my
knowledge it's had quite a few setbacks.

------
sithadmin
Here's a cool video of ToyotaHome (yes, that Toyota) assembling a modular home
in Japan:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzpv47o80eg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzpv47o80eg)

Their website: [http://www.toyotahome-aichi.co.jp/](http://www.toyotahome-
aichi.co.jp/) (JP only, no English)

------
bpicolo
I lived directly across from the Berkeley one shown in the article while they
were building it. I wonder how significant the cost benefits were - the time
to build didn't seem substantively different (another apartment complex a
couple blocks away went up in fairly comparable time it felt like), but I
could definitely imagine it being faster

------
nottorp
That's very interesting. As an eastern european, my idea of prefabricated
apartment buildings is something like this:

[http://s2.ziareromania.ro/?mmid=5d9526e31d488caac](http://s2.ziareromania.ro/?mmid=5d9526e31d488caac)

It's about the worst kind of home you could live in. No one wants it if they
can afford better.

~~~
anoncoward111
Pre-fab is a thing in the USA because our building codes and permitting
process are ridiculously complex, and also actually building a building is
also complex with lots of labor and risk and so on.

I absolutely love pre-fab everything-- long live pre-fab that is customized
afterwards.

~~~
nottorp
Is it also synonymous with low quality (down to 'shitty') housing?

~~~
anoncoward111
Partially but not for any physical reasons, just "social status" reasons.

Like, the quality of the construction is really good and these days is very
modern and stylish. Maybe in 1985, pre-fab houses were crappy mobile homes
that fell apart easily. But these days, no, pre-fab is much nicer than a
normal home constructed in the 1960s (most homes in NYC metro are very old).

However, if you are at the country club, and you mention that your house is a
pre-fab... well... the vieux-riche people will have a very negative opinion of
you.

------
walrus01
Too much particleboard, chipboard, oriented strand board, MDF board and cheap
shit that is used as an alternative to real plywood. I've seen what happens to
those particleboard nightmares when construction is temporarily paused in a
wet climate, for unforeseen reasons, and it gets rained on before the roof and
cladding are on.

------
tomatotomato37
I wonder how hard it would be for mobile home manufactors to support the
modular stacking of units. It would look redneck as hell, but could probably
go up even faster then wooden prefabs that still needs a building finished
around it

~~~
noir_lord
You could build the external structure and a "floor" (steel plate) for each
level, then you could swap out trailers if needed, a vertical trailer park.

Would need some way to get up and down and toilet/water.

Tbh by the time you've done all that you might as well just build a normal
modular high rise (that's how the local budget hotel did it, nearly whole
thing turned up as a series of containers each prefitted with plumbing and
power, then stacked together, hooked up and done, it went up insanely fast).

------
icc97
I thought the title was some metaphor for explaining what modern JavaScript
developers do when making applications

------
John_KZ
Did this article just presented prefabricated housing as an innovative and
novel way of building, and a solution to the housing crisis? Am I really
reading NYtimes?

------
gerardnll
That reminds me of the Portal 2 intro scene.

