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Business View Magazine
Plaza which is the forecourt to that new entrance. So,
we’ve been steadily chipping away at very important
public infrastructure around the BART station to create
a transit-oriented development.”
Malloy reports that over the last decade, 800 units of
housing have been built within a quarter mile of the
BART depot on both its east and west sides. “We have
243 apartment units going in right now that are within
that one quarter mile radius of the station,” she says,
“and another 300 or so are coming online in the next
few years. So, we’ve been building residential consis-
tently around our BART station over the last ten years
and will continue to do so, probably, for the next five.”
Malloy says that the apartments currently going up are
doing so at a very rapid pace because of the modu-
lar construction technology employed by the build-
ers. She explains: “Modular design works very well for
residential because you usually have repeating floor
plans as you march up the building. You stack all of
your kitchens and your bathrooms generally on top of
each other so that you have these utility cores; that’s
how multi-family typically works. And so, because of
the repetition in multi-family development, modular
construction works really, really well. It saves time and
money because much of the units are fabricated as
modular pieces, offsite, and delivered to the site fully-
finished. You essentially stack them in place, finish out
your utility corridors, finish out your circulation corri-
dors, provide a skin on the building to create a unify-
ing architectural vision, and you have the building. We
started the modular construction about eight weeks
ago and they have installed well over 100 units in the
last eight weeks. So, you can see how this speeds up
the construction process, immensely.”
Thomas Ruark is Union City’s Engineer, responsible
