Dive Brief:
- Forest City Ratner Companies, developer of the Atlantic Yards complex in Brooklyn, N.Y., has had huge problems making its faster, cheaper modular construction of residential high-rises get very far off the ground – only five stories, to be exact.
- A building known as B2 is supposed to get to 32 stories and use 930 modules to create 363 apartments, but problems, including getting the nearby module-making factory running and getting workers trained, have pushed its target date to late 2015, more than a year behind schedule.
- Forest City Ratner is not giving up on the modular project, but it has brought in a Chinese company, Greenland Holding Group, that will take a 70% interest and will put up the next three towers with conventional construction instead of the planned modular system.
Dive Insight:
The whole Atlantic Yards project was conceived in 2004, and principal Bruce C. Ratner has been driving it forward since then, getting the $1 billion Barclays Center built and opened. The company said it hopes that B2 will prove modular can work and that a fifth building, to follow Greenland's three conventional towers, will be modular.