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Watch Three Post-Disaster Apartments Get Built in 13 Hours

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This week, the Office of Emergency Management unveiled its post-disaster housing prototype, which is a fancy way of saying prefab(ulous) apartments that can be shipped in to an area hit by a storm like Sandy and get set up post-haste. Because they're stacked, they take up less room in a space-starved city than, say, a trailer park, and they provide quick, affordable housing in any location to folks whose homes have been destroyed by a disaster. The time-lapse video above shows how the first three apartments of their kind were put together in Downtown Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza. On a lot size of about 40 by 100 feet, it took 13.5 hours to stack containers that resulted in one 3-bedroom and two 1-bedroom pads, which range in size from 480 square feet to a really quite large 813 square feet. As per Gothamist, "each unit comes with a small balcony, storage space, a kitchen, living space, and bathroom, on top of the bedrooms." Now it's time for human lab rats—sorry, city employees only—to try these puppies out via short stays and for academics to study its effectiveness and eventual use on a large scale "to restore neighborhoods."
· Post-Disaster Housing Prototype Program [official]
· Inside NYC's First Post-Disaster Housing Units [Gothamist via BHB]
· Modular post-disaster housing coverage [Curbed]

OEM's Post-Disaster Housing Prototype

Red Cross Place and Cadman Plaza East, Brooklyn NY