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?

From the description given, "The developer hired contractors who didn't know what they were doing and ignored stop work orders when the city learned of the problems" seems like it might have a lot to do with it.

> hard to know what went wrong

> contractors who didn't know what they were doing and ignored stop work orders

I mean... if you can't even stop when told...