When you find a vacant lot in
area like the commercial side of Inwood, NYC, NY there are only two things you an do.
Either put in a parklet or put up a rental apartment building.
The property, a 50’ wide lot, was purchased in 2008 the
owners including Jeffery Brown, the CEO of Brown Hill Development in
began designing a rental building with commercial units on the first floor.
With NYC experiencing a broader acceptance of modular construction in high rise
buildings, it was only natural that they would choose to go modular.
Mr. Brown’s company is building the $13 million Inwood
project and it will consist of 56 modules that are under construction at DeLuxe Building Systems in
The steel framed 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.
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| Inwood project being built in the DeLuxe factory in Berwick, PA |
It is taking four months to manufacture the modules, during
which time the team has been building the foundation at the site. 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 in PA.
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.
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| Rendering of the completed building |
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. “You gotta luv modular”
