A local Texas developer is building a 350-unit luxury apartment community near in north Austin with steel due to the rising price of lumber.
To save money, Oden Hughes said it plans to build the complex using primarily cold-formed steel instead of lumber, with BlackSwan Steel fabricating about 80 percent of the framing for the four-story apartment buildings at its Houston facility and then trucking it to Austin for crews to assemble.
“Rising lumber prices have made light-gauge steel more appealing price-wise,” Oden Hughes construction president Eric Taylor. “We expect that it also will allow us to build more efficiently and result in a better product due to its precision, strength and durability.”