Can This Chicago Apartment Factory Make New Homes Affordable?

Skender’s 100,000-square-foot factory on the Southwest Side, which began production in late May, contains four bays with hulking gantry cranes overhead, as well as welding jig tables that are dozens of feet long. But don’t look to be wowed by sci-fi feats of robotic automation—there’s not a robot in sight (yet). Instead, the technology is aimed at seamless coordination.

Spaced at every few columns, the company will install media screens that workers will use to check off each step in the building process. “Every step and instruction in basically built into an app,” said Stacy Scopano, Skender’s chief technology officer. “If each crew gets off-sync, they can project [it] onto the TV, show the drawings, [and] float around the model. And over time, as we’re developing and modernizing these platforms, that’ll be how we’re watching the productivity of the install.”

Even with humans and not robots doing the work, the company is confident that continual refinement will yield efficiency. A three-flat apartment building can now go up in 90 days, Skender claims, instead of nine months. Swanson estimates that the three-flats will cost $335,000 per unit to build, not including land. In time, company leaders hope that economies of scale and increased efficiency will bring down that price.

The company has been investing in design talent as well, hiring Tim Swanson, formerly of the architecture firm Cannon Design, to be its chief design officer. That allows it to combine design, manufacturing, and construction within one vertically integrated system.

There’s an age-old tension between architects’ craving for creative freedom and the efficiencies of standardization, which Swanson greets with a taboo acknowledgement: “Eighty to 85 percent of our buildings should be the same.” Because codes dictate how many individual elements come together, buildings are well-suited to modular repetition, he says.

At Skender, this repetition begins once an order is placed, and staff begin identifying the relevant components and writing assembly-line schedules. When materials arrive, numbered and bundled with an instruction set, they’re laid out on massive welding frames that allow line workers to affix clamps that secure steel elements. It’s not super-high-tech, but it means that welds can be accurate to 1/1000 of an inch. (“If I’m out on the dirt at a site, I’m talking about 1/16 of an inch at best,” said Scopano.)

These elements are carried by gantry from station to station as fabricators log each step of the process in the system, via the media screen. “We can watch the efficiency of a specific task, for a specific weld, for a specific corner, and just keep going. The granularity of data we’ll be looking at and analyzing will be pretty fun,” Scopano said.

Company leaders expect to install some automated welding by the end of the year. They plan to use data they gather to isolate the “squeakiest wheel” and fix it with automation, “rather than carte-blanche throwing robots up and down the line,” according to Scopano.

Peter Murray, Skender’s president of manufacturing, anticipates a five-day construction cycle inside the factory before each unit is fitted together and loaded onto a truck. Units will leave the factory 95 percent complete. On site, the apartments will be stacked together with a bolt-and-pin system and some additional welding. Facades (stone accents and brick claddings) are clipped on, and the building is complete.

Recently, a few other companies have grabbed headlines for reviving the dream of omnipresent modular building. Unlike them, Skender is not a startup. As a legacy builder, it has long industry experience, and has staffed its factory with builders well-versed in its local market.

As well as economies of scale, proponents of modular architecture tout its freedom from weather-related delays, unpredictable site conditions, and fragmented supply chains. Those all stand to benefit Skender. No subcontractors will work in the factory, which will avoiding squabbles between HVAC or plumbing specialists who might blame each other when something goes wrong. But that also means Skender assumes all the risk. That has undone some past experiments in prefab and modular building.

At the factory’s opening, 25 people worked there, and Skender plans on hiring five more per week till it’s fully staffed at 150, all union labor. At this level, it’ll have the capacity to assemble 18,000 square feet of building at a time. That could put a dent in Chicago’s affordable housing needs, which are vast. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) reports that the Chicago area alone is short 472,000 units of rental affordable housing.

Skender has purposefully sought out affordable-housing applications for its process; Swanson says his goal is to “bring the cost down and tie it into something that maintains it that way.” First up is a batch of 10 three-flats (or 30 total apartments) for the developer Sterling Bay. Together, they are targeting families making 60 percent of the area median income—too much to qualify for much subsidized housing, but too little to fare well on the open market.