Julia Hansen of GSX speaks with Rusty Williams of Forming the Future about the Need for a Mindset Shift within the Construction Sector Towards More Sustainable Practices

The following transcript of the interview with Rusty Williams was posted on Medium by Rusty Williams.

GreenStaxx is an innovative player in the modular construction and sustainable building sector based out of the Boston area. I had a chance to speak with Julia Hansen about how GreenStaxx helps make construction more efficient and more sustainable. We talked about several recent projects and overall trends in construction.

Here’s the full video of their conversation:

Summary:

Julia introduced GreenStaxx’s unique approach to construction, emphasizing their library of standardized unit designs for multifamily buildings. This “Lego-like” system, comprising micro-units to three-bedroom units designed for modular construction, allows for the assembly of buildings of various shapes and sizes with remarkable efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

The key to this innovation is the standardization of components, enabling a streamlined and industrialized manufacturing process akin to consumer products, which is somewhat revolutionary in the construction industry.

A significant takeaway from our discussion was the need for a mindset shift within the construction sector towards more sustainable practices. Julia said that for developers open to reimagining construction processes, GreenStaxx offers a partnership to navigate the modular construction landscape efficiently. This approach help improve the affordability and accessibility of housing and aligns with urgent environmental sustainability goals.

GSX Modular Multifamily Project. Austin St. in Newton, MA.

Julia shared examples of GreenStaxx’s projects, like a 68-unit multifamily building in Newton, Massachusetts, showcasing the potential of modular construction to integrate seamlessly into urban environments with minimal disruption. Another example was a project in Cambridge that leveraged GreenStaxx’s design for a triple-decker, emphasizing the adaptability and sustainability of their models even in tight urban spaces.

Addressing the broader challenges facing modular construction, Julia pointed to the construction industry’s resistance to change and the fragmented nature of the housing sector in the U.S. as significant hurdles. Despite these challenges, she remains optimistic about modular construction’s potential to address the housing affordability crisis and the climate emergency through sustainable, efficient building practices.

On a personal note, Julia shared her passion for sustainability, underlining GreenStaxx’s commitment to designing units that meet the highest sustainability and human health standards. She underscored the environmental benefits of modular construction, including reduced waste, more efficient use of materials, and better building performance.

Full Transcript:

Rusty Williams: [00:00:00] So I’m pleased to welcome and say hello to Julia Hansen, who’s director of business development for GreenStaxx here in the Boston area. Julia, it’s very nice to meet you.

Julia Hansen: So nice to meet you too, Rusty. Thanks for having me on.

Rusty Williams: Well, it’s nice to, nice to have you. And I crossed paths with GreenStaxx a while back and you guys do some really innovative things.

Maybe the best place to start is. Just kind of describe how GreenStaxx fits into the modular and the construction industry and exactly what services you provide.

Julia Hansen: Yeah, absolutely. So we are we provide services primarily to developers and developers who are interested in the modular process for their projects and also open to a more streamlined and standardized way of Putting up buildings.

So Green Stacks is specialization is in providing a [00:01:00] library of unit designs for multifamily buildings. And within this library, we have standardized micro units and one bedroom units, three bedroom units that have all been modified for being part of any, almost any shape or size of building. And so we have corner units, corridor units units that incorporate space for an elevator shaft.

And the idea is that with this with this collection of almost like Lego blocks for multifamily buildings, you can assemble buildings of various shapes and sizes, but the components that you’re using are all the same. And why does this really matter for the modular construction industry? So, you know, when you think about how a typical product is made in a factory, you know, there’s, there’s one product, maybe there’s a few different variations on the size or some of its features, but then the [00:02:00] factory can make all of those products in a very streamlined and industrialized way.

And that’s what the modular construction process offers to the construction industry. But without that standardization of what is being built, it’s really hard to achieve the efficiencies that we see that we see in other industries, like, you know, like consumer products, for example. And so GreenStaxx really helps developers.

Get the most bang for their buck when using a modular process if they’re open to using standardized designs. And I think that is and, you know, maybe this is getting a little ahead of of, of your questions, but, you know, that openness to thinking about construction a little bit differently you know, thinking of it like other industries is where I think the I think that’s where the landscape is sort of pointing us to it’s really about a Like [00:03:00] a mindset shift in how we do buildings at for those developers who are interested in what’s coming next and about harnessing all the potential that modular has to offer we, we want to be their partners and help them You know, help guide them through the modular process and the most efficient and streamlined way possible.

Rusty Williams: So it’s interesting. You’re talking about standardizing but it in Legos, like people will think of, you know, Legos often as, as representative of the modular process. But you also said there’s so many variations within the standardization that it almost is like, you know, a customized approach to standardization.

Is that a fair way to characterize it?

Julia Hansen: Yeah, that that that’s fair. But when you think of, you know, a set of Legos you can think about, you know, pieces of different sizes, different colors, different configurations, but what helps what what makes it possible to you know, connect them and link them together and start building [00:04:00] your structure is that the little the little nubs and sort of connector pieces are all aligned, no matter what kind of what kind of piece you’re dealing with, whether it’s a tiny piece or a larger piece.

And that’s what allows you to connect them in really any way you want. And so that is a key piece of designing standardized units for multifamily. Yes, you’d want a limited number of different pieces for the puzzle, but crucially, they all need to fit together in very specific ways. And so we’re thinking about the the plumbing and the electrical and like the sort of all the MEP systems that need to be Connected between the modular boxes.

So just just like Legos. They need to be able to be connected to each other in the right places. But once you have that kind of standardized throughout, you can introduce pieces of different sizes and you can start building structures almost any way you want. [00:05:00]

Rusty Williams: Great. So you just mentioned multifamily. Do you think that’s the best example of the best use case for the GreenStaxx approach and software or is, or are there other applications?

Julia Hansen: well, GreenStaxx focuses specifically on multifamily. And that goes back to you know, the history of our company and the values of the founders who have roots in the affordable housing Field and this and the sustainably built housing. That’s, that’s been in our focus over decades.

And so, you know, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone. We really want to focus on an area of the construction industry that we feel is really important to get right. Not only. For the purposes of addressing the housing affordability crisis, but also we’re in a climate crisis. And so we really need to be building sustainable buildings you know, net zero buildings, [00:06:00] passive house buildings and to do it quickly in order to meet the needs of so many people who are with insufficient or too expensive housing at the, at the moment.

But coming back to your question I think this methodology is well suited for a lot of different markets hospitality would be an obvious one medical centers and and, and hospitals, any building that has a need for repeatable units would be a really good fit for this For this methodology, where it might not makes as much sense are is, is for buildings that require a lot of customization upfront.

So maybe it’s a particular kind of lab space or a very you know, sort of like an iconic kind of building that will be like the flagship building for a particular institution. Those could certainly be made in a modular factory, but because they don’t require or they don’t They don’t lend themselves to the type of standardized [00:07:00] components.

They wouldn’t derive as much benefit from using modular as some other types of projects would such as hospitals, hotels, multifamily.

Rusty Williams: So you just mentioned affordable housing. I actually read an article recently that described the housing costs in general becoming out of reach for, you know, particularly people who are, you know, in their twenties and thirties and they described the key issue as being inelasticity of supply.

And modular holds a promise for that, and yet it doesn’t really seem to be getting the traction and the the embraced as, as, you know, widely as you think with those dynamics, do you do you have sort of a greater sense of what might be happening to hold it back or what might be You might be able to do to help move it forward.

Julia Hansen: Well, I think I think construction costs is one [00:08:00] aspect of the housing affordability crisis. Another another big aspect is zoning, which, of course, you know, a company like Green Stacks has very little influence on on zoning. But I think when it comes to, you know, why are apartment buildings, for example, or sort of larger multifamily buildings.

You know, why haven’t they adopted the modular construction method already? And I think, you know, I don’t I don’t think there’s like a, you know, a single good answer. I think one thing in especially in this country is is about mindset for one, You know, the, the folks who are on the suffering side of the housing crisis are not the people who are involved in in construction.

So it would be, you know, young people looking to buy a starter home. And You know, they’re the ones who are most [00:09:00] affected by this issue versus the architects and the construction managers and the developers who would be providing that that product or that service to to meet the demand of the market.

And I think in within the construction industry, there’s a bit of a mindset of if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. And and I, you know, I think it just takes a lot of, like, imagination and. Sort of rethinking a business’s own processes and doing some retraining and sort of, you know, jostling up their, their internal models of operation, which takes a lot of work and is certainly worth it on the on the other side.

But, but it’s hard. And I think we need to acknowledge that it’s, it’s hard to change how things are done in an industry that has, you know, gotten to where it is today, doing things the way they’ve always done them. But I also think that, you know, when you compare the U. S. Situation [00:10:00] with other countries that have adopted modular especially for housing.

So like Japan and Sweden those are countries where there’s a lot more socialized housing. And so when you have a government that is interested in providing, you know, very sufficient or, you know, enough housing for to meet the needs of. Everybody living there and is a big enough player in order to influence the constellation of all of the other industry players like the architects and the construction managers and the financing institutions.

You know, I think in in those places you know, you can really see a greater push for modular because. Of the cost savings and the time savings that the you know, that this that this more socialized housing provider is really interested and is and is powerful enough to influence and here in the U.S. You know, we have a very fragmented and and [00:11:00] privatized housing sector. So you know, we have a lot of individual developers. Working with individual subcontractors and architects and it’s just, it’s not as easy to say, okay, everybody start doing it this way because, you know, every, this is, it’s a, it’s a different market system.

And so I think that has something to do with it as well. And and of course, there’s the, the, the weather considerations in places like Sweden, especially where it’s impossible to build all year long. And I think we see a little bit of that in New England as well, but certainly in other parts of the country it’s less of an issue.

And so there’s there’s less, less of a need that is immediately solvable by the modular industry.

Rusty Williams: Interesting. Well, it seems like all the forces are pushing it forward, but there’s always something holding it back. Could you give, you mentioned multifamilies really the forte of GreenStaxx. Can you give one or two examples of projects that GreenStaxx has done that are good [00:12:00] representative of where it really kind of excels?

Julia Hansen: Yeah, well one of our recent projects was a 68 units multifamily building in Newton Massachusetts. And that, that was a really nice example of a project because it was able to go up. Pretty quickly especially compared to a stick built option conventionally built option. And the the, the design itself was also sort of emblematic of how unique you can get a building to be even while using Standardized internal components, which are the units in our model.

And so this project was built to incorporate a lot of public space. So it kind of converted what used to be a through street into a public plaza. It had commercial space on the ground floor, and then 3 or 4 stories of living units above it. So it was very well integrated into the urban environment.

It was also [00:13:00] able to be built without without as much dis disruption right. To the commercial activity. That was, you know, taking place on that street already. So you know that that’s a really nice building and, and folks have had a lot of nice things to say about it you know, as they start occupying the units.

But another one that I think is, is also really interesting. And this is a little bit out of GreenStaxx is sort of sort of main main collection of units because we, we really focus on larger multifamily units, but we’ve also developed a triple decker design, like standardized design for a triple decker that started out kind of as a one off project but then, you know, being GreenStaxx, we were interested in, in doing more with it and developing it into a standardized Product.

And so this was a, a project that was initially developed for a a family whose, whose home had burned down in Cambridge port in, [00:14:00] in Cambridge. And they wanted to rebuild it but to do it in the passive house. Using passive house technology, and so that was developed. It went up was, you know, very successful.

It allowed this family to remain in place as the various family members aged, as well as to rent out the, the, the second and third floor units and have some income that way. But then when, you know, looking around at some other project opportunities, we realized that this was a perfect template. For for infill buildings.

In really tight urban places. So the next time that we applied that design was in Lowell on a on a modest urban lot, and we we used the same design as in Cambridge, and then we flipped it so that we had two two triple deckers side by side and kind of mirroring each other. And and [00:15:00] those those units are going in as we speak, they were actually delivered to the site last week and you know, we saw the big crane come in and sort of start dropping the boxes 1 after another and it was incredible because within 1 day.

I would say 90 percent of the structure was complete. They actually had to come back the next day and do the last two remaining boxes. But I think out of the 12 for the entire building, they got 10 in, in one day. And you know, and it was complete with, you know you know, the floor was already installed.

The cabinets were already installed. Some of the appliances were delivered you know, in their boxes, sort of like in the living room or in the in the bedroom, you know, just waiting to be unboxed and installed right there you know, arriving altogether. And you know, so now the, the CM on the project is working on what we call the button up, you know, making all those connections between the boxes [00:16:00] and and eventually moving through into the final touches, like putting that last coat of paint on the inside doing the roof.

And it should be ready for move in within just a couple months. So that’s, that’s really the beauty of of using standardized designs. You know, there’s no, there’s no one building fits all model, but there are certain standardized units or those standardized component components that are, you know, what make up the inside, not necessarily, you know, visible from the outside, but You know, we really saved a lot of time in designing the 2nd project because we were starting from a design that had already been already had been built before.

So, with the modular manufacturer, which was the same 1 that we used in the Cambridge project they were able to do their, their side of the design work much, much faster because they had already seen these designs. They’d already modified. You know, [00:17:00] what the architects sent over into shop drawings for, you know, for their for their team.

And so this just really speeds up the process a lot. So that’s you know, that’s that’s really what we’re about is, you know, trying to come up with designs that are, you know, highly livable, highly sustainable, and then do that over and over again in different configurations, but using the same parts.

Rusty Williams: Interesting. That’s, that sounds fascinating and like a great, a great way to, you know, kind of learn from an experience and then leverage it. Why don’t we wrap up as a last question more on a personal level? Like you mentioned that. You were drawn to this industry and more specifically to green stacks because of your interest in sustainability and a background of sustainability could even really sort of quick answer.

Like, what, what are the attributes of green stacks and probably more broadly modular and prefab that you think have the biggest impact on on [00:18:00] sustainability?

Julia Hansen: Well on on a green stacks level we design our units to be you know, to meet, to meet passive house standards. And obviously the unit itself can’t guarantee a passive house.

It’s a, it’s a building level certification, but we use high performance energy systems and we are also we’re also revising our standard specification to make sure that Everything that goes inside the units that, you know, like the floors, like the paint, all those things are really as healthy as possible.

So from a human health point of view, as well as an energy use point of view, the units themselves are, you know, have the highest sustainability standards. And we aim to have continuous improvement to, you know, to get them to be continuously as good as, as it can be but more on like a broader scale of of modular fabrications there, there’s a lot less waste that takes place.

So when you think of, you [00:19:00] know, all of the container fulls of materials of you know, sheet rock and, and would that you see on construction sites. Most of that is eliminated when using the modular construction process because parts are cut to be exactly what is needed inside the factory. And there’s just a lot more control that the, that the team, that the building team has over you know, what comes in and what is used at every part of the process because they’re working on an assembly line.

And in terms of transportation a lot of folks think that. Because the boxes are being transported from, from somewhere else and coming into their final location that that’s a lot of transportation cost and energy. And that’s true. But when compared to all of the little trips that take place during the typical construction process, it usually turns out to be A net a net savings from the cost and the energy required [00:20:00] for transportation.

And then finally just by by building within a climate controlled environment it’s possible to achieve much higher precision and tolerances. So when you think about, you know, build things that leak air, for example, and that, you know, really drains their, their, their energy performance that can be avoided much more easily and controlled for and and monitored much more carefully when you’re in the when you’re in a factory setting.

So those are all reasons that modular is really It’s it’s very promising. It’s not necessarily like a magic wand, but like it has a lot of the components to make it a lot easier to reduce the amount of embodied carbon in buildings because of because of the waste because of the transportation and because you’re actually building a product that will perform better over time.

Rusty Williams: Fascinating. Well, I, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk. It’s a pleasure to meet you and and learn more [00:21:00] about GreenStaxx and I’ll be eager to hear, you know, kind of other, other projects you’re working on and, and learn more as, as, as time goes on.

Julia Hansen: Likewise. Thanks so much, Rusty. And it’s great that that all the work that you’re putting into, you know, supporting thoughts thought leadership and, and the sharing of knowledge within this industry.

It’s really appreciated.

Rusty Williams: Well, it’s great meeting you and we’ll talk soon.