Ramstad: Devean George's new factory isn't just a feel-good project

People in Minneapolis have been placing their hopes and dreams on the shoulders of Devean George ever since the Los Angeles Lakers drafted him out of his college career at Augsburg in 1999.

After developing apartment buildings and affordable housing in north Minneapolis, the poorest part of the city, George is now taking on his biggest project yet.

His new company, George Modular Solutions, represents a step up the value chain for him. The firm will build homes and other structures in component pieces within the comfort of a former printing plant on Washington Avenue N.

The components, or mods, will be trucked to a construction site and put together like a 3-D puzzle.

"I was always looking for a way to get things done more efficiently, faster and kind of control things," George said in an interview at the company's groundbreaking event last week.

"I didn't want to be in line anymore," he added. "I'd be ready to go on my project, and [contractors] would say, 'You're sixth in line.'"

The first projects that will come out of the plant, which will start production next spring, will be the Village Creek Apartments that he is developing in Brooklyn Park and a housing development planned for the Upper Harbor Terminal in Minneapolis.

Most of the news coverage on the groundbreaking focused on George's commitment to the North Side. Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, council members Jeremiah Ellison and Latrisha Vetaw and other civic leaders all took turns praising the project and George.

At the center of the event and the work leading up to it was Bill English, the 90-year-old former 3M and Control Data executive, who for decades also led the Sabathani Community Center in Minneapolis. He told me he's been working on bringing a major new manufacturing business to north Minneapolis for seven years.

English and George pulled together financing from Sunrise Bank, which has worked with the pair before, as well as a $2 million loan from the city of Minneapolis and $3 million in grants from the state, if the business hits hiring goals.

The business isn't just playing catch-up in the rapidly growing modular housing business. George Modular will build with steel, pushing the envelope with buildings that will be able to go higher and be larger than those built with wood.

"We can do nine-, 10-story hotels, office buildings and schools, and obviously our affordable housing and apartment buildings," George said. "So we'll be focusing on all those lanes. We have a proposal right now to get into tiny-house manufacturing. So we have a lot of areas that we're going into."

When I first looked around the former printing plant, the steel poles holding up the roof seemed likely to get in the way of the mods, which can sometimes be 70 feet long. That's no problem, said Dean Dovolis, principal at DJR architecture.

"With the air casters, they can be easily moved around here," Dovolis said. He's referring to the systems that lift heavy objects a few centimeters off the ground with bursts of air pressure, the way plastic pucks float around an air-hockey table.

I first saw them in use at Rise Modular in Owatonna early last year. At that time, Rise was working on projects in Minnesota, including an affordable housing building in Minneapolis that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited on Monday.

Now, Rise is working on a student housing building for Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., a workforce housing project in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and a hotel in Missouri, said Christian Lawrence, the company's CEO. George and his team have visited Rise's factory. Lawrence said he sees the new company as a peer aiming at a different part of the market.

"We are big supporters of them and we're expecting they will do very well," Lawrence said.

Executives at both companies said more developers and contractors are starting to recognize the cost and time savings that comes from modular construction inside of factories. Like many people in real estate and construction, they expect orders to surge when the Federal Reserve starts bringing down interest rates.

"We just need to make sure that we have a pipeline of building projects priced at the correct price and that keep everyone employed," Will Gorrilla, chief operating officer at George Modular, said.

While there's a lot of symbolism and community expectation placed on George Modular, George said he's focused on the day-to-day work of getting a business going. There's a plant to equip, workers to hire and a board of directors to be appointed.

"I'll be working on bringing on deals and making sure the culture is right," George said. "Making sure we're hiring and our goals are being hit."