Brooklyn on the Rise at Atlantic Yards

Huge doings in Brooklyn: Almost a year after breaking ground for the first of 16 planned modular apartment towers adjacent to the Barclays Center, developer Forest City Ratner hoisted the first piece into place yesterday. When completed next year, the 32-story B2 tower will be the tallest modular building in the world, standing 322 feet at the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street.

Construction of the 363-unit apartment building begins the arrival of the affordable housing that was promised for the site, only to be delayed by the economy and a shortsighted drive to block the entire $4.9 billion, 22-acre project, including the Barclays arena.

Half of the units in the initial tower will have rents that are in range for working- and middle-class New Yorkers.

When Atlantic Yards is finished, the long-vacant tracts will be home to 6,400 total apartments, more than 2,200 of which will have city-set affordable rents, and a couple hundred of which will be affordable condos.

[See ElectricWeb | Blogger, Oct 21, 2013]

All told, the 16 buildings are slated to eventually house nearly 6,500 units of housing both affordable and market-rate, 247,000 square feet of retail, about 340,000 square feet of office space and 8 acres of open space, which will proceed in two development phases.

B2, as the first tower is known, will contain 181 units of affordable housing.

The reasonably priced units can’t come soon enough. Not when one in three New Yorkers spends half of his or her income in rent. Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who was a major Atlantic Yards supporter, has promised to ramp up production of affordable housing.

A key factor is summarized in a little word: prefab. The builders are saving money and time by doing almost all the construction inside a Brooklyn factory staffed with 125 skilled, unionized workers. The 363 prefabricated units are being built at a plant at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and will be trucked to the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street.

Prefabricated living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, stairways and the like will be trucked to the worksite, complete with plumbing and electric, in the form of 900 steel-framed building blocks. Crews will then lock the components together.

The innovative technique is a potentially revolutionary way to keep costs, and ultimately rents, down. There also happens to be less noise and debris on site, a bonus for neighborhoods battered by construction headaches.

[See ElectricWeb | Blogger, Dec 4, 2012]

Prefab has been in use for single-family and smaller homes for many years. At Atlantic Yards, it’s coming to scale. The tower at Flatbush and Dean will be the world’s tallest such building, and more could soon be in the offing.

This returns us to the mayor-elect, who has pledged to build or preserve 200,000 affordable housing units. None of the ideas he campaigned on, from changing zoning rules to unlocking vacant lots, would change the expensive underlying economics of erecting buildings in New York City.

Prefab just might.

There will be many public policy wrinkles to work out: how to answer challenges from workers protecting their turf, like union electricians; and how to properly inspect units built out-of-state.

[See ElectricWeb | Blogger, Nov 20, 2011]

“We are excited about the potential opportunity this joint venture presents to accelerate vertical development at the project, including delivery of affordable housing,” the firm said in a statement.

All told, the 16 buildings are slated to eventually house nearly 6,500 units of housing both affordable and market-rate, 247,000 square feet of retail, about 340,000 square feet of office space and 8 acres of open space, which will proceed in two development phases.

B2, as the first tower is known, will contain 181 units of affordable housing.

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