By Ryan Doherty, Published August 2, 2024
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.
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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.
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