For years, the 15,700-square-foot lot on Bowdoin Street in Providence’s Olneyville neighborhood sat empty and strewn with garbage after a fatal fire destroyed several buildings on the property in early 2018. Then came the cranes.
In 2022, nonprofit affordable housing developer ONE Neighborhood Builders completed construction on an eight-unit, $2.2 million apartment house on the parcel. But most of the construction didn’t take place in Providence. The units were built in Pennsylvania before being transported to Bowdoin Street.
In Rhode Island and across the country, some housing developers have been turning to this type of building – known as modular construction – to spur housing development and cut costs. Some believe that this could help address the Ocean State’s housing crisis.
In modular construction, buildings are manufactured off-site in a factory setting. Units are fabricated repeatedly under controlled conditions while site work takes place at the property where the units are destined to be located.
These overlapping timelines of manufacturing and site work cut the construction time and the costs, too.
“One of the driving factors to start considering alternate forms of construction are costs,” said Michelle Bleau, the group’s director of housing development. “The faster we can get something built and occupied, the better it is.”
For the Bowdoin Street project, modular construction cut costs per unit from around $350,000 to $280,000, in addition to speeding up the construction timeline from 15 months to eight months. At one point, cranes were called in to lift into place the prefabricated room-sized boxes that made up the apartments. The boxes already included rough plumbing, with light fixtures, toilets and even vanity mirrors already built in. Pre-built roof trusses popped up once the second-story units were placed, then a general contractor finished the project with electrical work, plumbing and finer construction detailing.
Bleau says this was particularly beneficial for ONE Neighborhood’s mission to provide affordable housing. Rent at the Bowdoin Street Rowhouse is set at 50% to 80% of the area’s median income.
The increased use of modular homes as a way to boost housing production has garnered support from at least one state leader.
This spring, House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi, D-Warwick, introduced legislation that would have allowed manufactured homes in all single-family neighborhoods throughout Rhode Island, as long as they met local dimensional, setback and parking requirements.
The measure was part of Shekarchi’s package of housing legislation, but it was amended to say that cities and towns “may” allow manufactured homes as a type of single-family home instead of requiring that they be allowed.
The bill was signed by Gov. Daniel J. McKee in June, but Shekarchi expressed disappointment that it was amended, saying the changes were the result of pushback from cities and towns.
“Reality is a lot of communities don’t want affordable housing,” he said.
Still, Shekarchi hopes the law “gets rid of the stigma” around manufactured homes, which he views as having the potential to address the state’s housing crisis. Manufactured homes are “not the trailer parks” some might picture, rather most people “can’t tell the difference” between traditionally constructed and modular housing, Shekarchi said.
But modular construction comes with new challenges.
Namely, few companies manufacture modular homes in New England, and none are in Rhode Island. Instead, modular home companies in Rhode Island must buy houses from out-of-state companies, which are then transported to the Ocean State. This distance leads to higher costs.
In the case of the Bowdoin Street Rowhouse, the modular units were shipped on trucks from Champion Modular Homes in Liverpool, Pa., near Harrisburg.
“If there [were] a local builder here in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, that would further defray costs,” said Jennifer Hawkins, ONE Neighborhood’s CEO and president.
The financing for modular homes also differs.
“The bulk of your total construction budget is spent upfront because you have to preorder these panels in order for them to be manufactured off-site,” Bleau said. “In wood-frame or more traditional – not modular – [construction], you pay for your construction as you go; whereas in modular, you really have to have that upfront capital.”
In modular construction, there are also site-specific considerations.
The nonprofit had investigated using modular construction on another project in Providence, but the geography and infrastructure presented problems.
“It was on a really steep street, and there were telephone wires that would make the crane placing the boxes on the site quite challenging,” Hawkins said. “It’s just another consideration: thinking about where you can site modular construction.”
With these lessons in mind from its first modular housing development, ONE Neighborhood Builders has begun planning its second modular project: 20 rental units to be built on Sheridan Street, also in Olneyville. The nonprofit is working with the same team as the Bowdoin Street development, hoping to replicate its success.
Currently, ONE Neighborhood is working on securing its funding sources and finalizing approval from city officials. Assuming all funding goes according to plan, the project could be completed by 2026.
