There was another Hacker News thread last month about a 32-floor prefab apartment skyscraper in Brooklyn[1]. Many commenters said the promise was hyped and that construction was slow. It was disappointing because this seems like a good solution for places like the Bay Area where armies of single professionals would happily live in small, private units with common space amenities instead of sharing a $4-5k/mo two-bedroom with a roommate.<p>Does anyone know whether these apartments would be legal in California? I did a cursory search and it looks like all apartments need one 120sqft room and at least 70sqft for any other living rooms (not storage?). Oakland has some additional requirements about partitions separating kitchens, but it's unspecific about how an "efficiency apartment" designation modifies that. Not sure about SF regulations, assuming they're even more onerous.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8873906" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8873906</a>
This is really fantastic! It's doing something really amazing and important in the realm of architecture and construction that's much needed.<p>It's weather-agnostic - (certain construction work you just can't do in winter). Bottlenecks are easily controlled: No questions about worrying about different trades (say, the structural steel work, etc) being slow and pushing all other aspects of the entire project behind. It's more predictable, since you have very clear quantifiable markers of progress (what % of units are completely finished?) It cuts down on the costly / cumbersome process of using a hoist during construction, which is expensive and timely since you have to hire specialized labor and get a permit to close off the street.<p>To use a programming analogy, it's effectively a kind of <i></i>parallelization or non-blocking i/o<i></i>, since you can track progress in a reliable, controlled setting, stagger your work, and have many different trades working at once, on different aspects. (Electrician behind schedule on half of the units? You can still have the plumbing crew work on the finished half while bringing more electricians on board.)<p>Present-day construction is highly linear, mostly single-threaded and filled with bottlenecks everywhere, since it's both a logistical and financial disincentive to hire a trade to come in to do work if there's not enough work for them to do. The contractor pads the schedule to make sure that previous work will be ready for future work. As a result, construction times are longer, less predictable, etc.<p>Granted, this isn't totally new, but it's really important that prefabrication is getting more visibility and is understood to be the architectural game-changer that it will be in the future.
If the details shown on this page [1] are right, these things are built in a silly way: the batt insulation between the steel studs is almost useless, and could even lead to condensation problems [2].<p>[1] <a href="http://cargocollective.com/pickupsticks/filter/Prefab/Modular-Prefabrication-Part-I-Fundamentals" rel="nofollow">http://cargocollective.com/pickupsticks/filter/Prefab/Modula...</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-005-a-bridge-too-far?topic=doctypes/insights" rel="nofollow">http://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-005-a-...</a>
"There are some 3,000 apartments under 400 square feet in Manhattan alone."<p>There's absolutely no way that is correct, it has to be off by at least 10x.
I would be interested in hearing comments by anyone who lives in such a space. There was a discussion about doing something similar in Sunnyvale and the lack of actual experience really made it hard to debate.
Semi related was this article about using tiny prefab homes to solve homelessness.<p><a href="https://collectively.org/en/article/size-does-matter-how-the-tiny-house-movement-is-solving-the-homeless-crisis" rel="nofollow">https://collectively.org/en/article/size-does-matter-how-the...</a>
After reading the HN comments, I just realize that the 'apartment' has really different scales for married (or family) and unmarried people. Unmarried people are likely sharing units and hence pay much less than married or families.
How do these compare in size to a shipping container? In the rendering this is what the last image reminded me of.<p>That seems so crazy expensive for such a small space not adjacent to a metro station.
That's doing less with more. New types of housing should be designed to improve quality of life/ecological footprint. Spending that much to live inside a matchbox can't be ok.