In our first episode, Julia Hansen, Director of Business Development & Partnerships, introduces GreenStaxx and discusses the importance of standardized design in modular multifamily construction.
Julia explains how developers face challenges in making projects financially viable, especially for affordable housing. Watch the full episode below.
Summary
The founders of GreenStaxx, Art Klipfel and Gwen Noyes, realized that there were limited ways to design great apartment units and saw the potential of offsite modular construction.
They developed libraries of standardized unit designs that could be efficiently manufactured offsite and delivered as boxes to the project site. This replicability and predictability in design helped unlock more affordable and environmentally friendly housing.
Takeaways
Standardized design is crucial for making modular multifamily housing more affordable and efficient.
Developers face challenges in making projects financially viable, especially for affordable housing.
Offsite modular construction offers the potential for greater efficiency and sustainability.
Replicability and predictability in design can lead to faster construction timelines and better building products.
GreenStaxx is committed to creating more affordable and environmentally friendly housing through standardized design.
Read the full transcript here:
Hi, and welcome to the GreenStaxx podcast, Thinking Inside the Box. I'm Julia Hansen, your host and the Director of Business Development and Partnerships at GreenStaxx. Our aim for this mini-series is to host conversations that explore how standardized design can be a solution to advancing the modular multifamily construction industry, thereby tackling the affordable housing crisis and creating healthier, more environmentally sound buildings.
In this first episode of Thinking Inside the Box, I will introduce GreenStaxx and explain how we came to the conviction that standardized design is the key to making modular multifamily housing deliver great homes at a lower cost. I'll also discuss what to expect for the rest of the series. So, let's get into it.
Developers of multifamily buildings face enormous challenges in penciling out projects, especially given the interest rates. This is especially true when the project is intended to meet the price range of medium or low-income earners or is located outside the hottest real estate markets where rents tend to be lower.
The GreenStaxx founders, Art Klipfel and Gwen Noyes experienced this dilemma personally through their multifamily projects in the Boston area that they developed under their company Unihab, which was later reorganized as Oak Tree Development.
Gwen and Art wanted to create projects with a considerable affordable housing component in areas close to public transportation and do so in a way that maximizes the well-being of those living in the buildings. Over the course of several projects of different sizes and in different areas of the more significant Boston metropolitan market, they realized that there were a few different ways to build a great one-bedroom apartment unit or a great two- or three-bedroom apartment unit for that matter. And they realized that, especially in larger projects, the same unit typologies or unit designs tended to be repeated repeatedly.
Throughout this time, Art was also fascinated by the potential of offsite modular construction, where the main structure of the building is done in a factory, then delivered to the project site and built up in a matter of days. Early in his career as an architect in the 1970s, Art worked on a proposal for a huge design center in New York City, which would have had tons of exhibition space and thousands of housing units.
all constructed offsite as modules and then delivered to the densest part of New York City.
This project exemplified for Art how much more efficient the construction industry could become. In the 1970s, factory-built single-family homes were well known, but doing larger-scale modular projects was still new.
For these larger projects, Art and Gwen believed that modular construction just needed to be done more to build up real-world examples of how this technology and process improves upon conventional construction. So they pushed for each of their UniHAB and Oak Tree multifamily projects to be built using the modular manufacturing method.
In this process, they developed libraries of standardized unit designs that were planned to be as straightforward as possible to manufacture offsite and then delivered as boxes to the project site. Those boxes would be stacked one on top of each other to create the building. Over the course of many such multifamily projects, they honed the unit design library, standardizing elements like kitchens, bathrooms, and utility closets so that they could be built as efficiently as possible in the factory and didn't have to be redesigned each time a new housing project started. T
his replicability inherent in the design gave each new project greater predictability. Replicability and predictability are two topics that we will discuss in this podcast.
So this is how GreenStaxx was born. Art and Gwen recognized that their challenge as developers of multifamily projects could be met using a standardized unit library specifically designed for the modular construction process. They were driven by the belief that this could help unlock more and better housing.
Gwen and Art founded GreenStaxx to help other developers create more housing units, more affordably and so, why the name GreenStaxx? In addition to their desire to build homes more affordably, Gwen and Art are committed to making housing as environmentally friendly as possible. By default, all the units are designed with all electric appliances and use heat pumps for heating and cooling. Additionally, modular construction just on its own is a lot more sustainable overall than regular construction because it reduces the amount of material waste, and the construction of a finished product is more airtight and better insulated than typical stick-built construction.
One of the GreenStaxx libraries, designed after the iconic New England triple-decker typology, was even designed to meet passive house standards. Gwen and Art are also active in many climate and environmental groups in the Boston area which is coincidentally how I became acquainted with them. And so the commitment to leaving this world better than how we found it runs deep in GreenStaxx's DNA.
In this first mini-series of Thinking Inside the Box, we're going to focus on why we believe that standardized unit design is the key to unlocking more efficiencies in the modular multifamily construction industry and how it leads to more successful projects overall. Over next five episodes, we're going to take a deep dive into a case study of using GreenStaxx's Triple Decker Design Library in two different projects, one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the other in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Through these conversations, we're going to explore how replicating a standardized design yielded a faster construction timeline and a better building product. I'll introduce a key player for these two projects in each episode, and we'll hear their insights and perspectives on how they navigated their piece of the modular construction process puzzle.
With these conversations, we aim to share GreenStaxx's experience and knowledge in leveraging standardized design for multifamily. We'll share how we perfected our process so that others can learn from our experience, sometimes our mistakes, and so that we can create better, greener, and more cost-effective housing as an industry.
So, I'll see you for our next episode with GreenStaxx's Director of Product, Hans Hawrysz, where we will discuss industrialized construction and give you an in-depth view of the GreenStaxx standardized design libraries.
Thank you for listening to Inside the Box and Thinking Inside the Box, Advancing Modular Multifamily Construction. Please remember to subscribe if you like this episode and leave any comments or questions. The future is modular.