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When construction started on a new affordable apartment building in Brooklyn, most of the work on the site happened very quickly. Instead of typical construction, cranes lifted giant modular units into the air—each made up of two separate apartments, plus the corridor between them—and set them into place.

Trucks delivered nearly four dozen 60-foot-long “mods” from the factory where they were built in Pennsylvania, staging them next to a nearby cemetery in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush. Then, each day for two weeks, construction crews stacked together as many as six of the units to build the complex, called Bethany Terraces. (The massive size of the units made them more challenging to transport than a single modular apartment at a time, but the configuration helped shrink the time for installation on site.)