By Taylor Williams DALLAS — Costs are always a sensitive subject in all types of residential and commercial development. But with projects that draw heavily on alternative and public-sector sources of financing to pencil out — namely affordable housing — the margin for error on cost overruns is even tighter. That’s a very unfortunate reality for developers working to mitigate America’s profound shortage of both affordable housing and housing that’s affordable. But with measured, deliberate upfront planning and collaboration between architects, engineers and general contractors, some of that risk can be mitigated. Editor’s note: InterFace Conference Group, a division of France Media Inc., produces networking and educational conferences for commercial real estate executives. To sign up for email announcements about specific events, visit www.interfaceconferencegroup.com/subscribe. To keep these critical developments on time and on budget, these project partners have had to not only adjust some of their traditional forms of value engineering (VE) — the term given to the collective effort of cost minimization and utility maximization over the course of a project — but also embrace completely new ones. The framework for trying new types of VE hinges on the notion that the whole of the project is greater than the sum of the …
