A developer in my hometown tried to build a manufactured/modular housing development. He got the approvals, demolished most of the existing structure that was on the parcel, purchased the modules from a supplier in Quebec and began to assemble them. Everyone was on board.

It was a complete disaster. The developer hired contractors who didn't know what they were doing and ignored stop work orders when the city learned of the problems, which included setting the modular units on their foundations without the proper permits and in violation of state building code. A separate fire department inspection deemed the structure "unsafe for interior firefighting or for interior response by first responders." The site has been abandoned for about 5 years, and the development company filed for bankruptcy.

Sounds like a sad story, but hard to know what went wrong. Did a safe design collide with regulations that weren't written with modular housing in mind? Did the modularity cause normal approval processes to happen out of order, allowing construction to mistakenly start before fire approval? Or was this simply the often Kafkaesque permitting process actually correctly identifying serious issues?