Part One: 1960 to 1979
Garden style apartments have been good for the truss business, but have morphed into an almost unrecognizable beast. In making this transition, component manufacturers have built on 40+ years of experience, and have conquered this beast, but not without transforming design, manufacturing, and logistics. Here is a quick survey of this 50-year roller coaster ride.
1960’s: Those repetitive, rectangular apartment buildings of old provided an ideal venue for trusses, even in stick-framed markets, but not initially. The trend and the term, “garden style,” began in Southern California before wood trusses were popularized. The rapid population growth there and the ready acceptance of wood construction encouraged development of large complexes like the one shown in the photo. Boatloads of old-growth green Douglas Fir arrived in Long Beach, dried in the desert air, and rapidly transformed the landscape to accommodate tens of thousands of defense and oil industry workers. The open “garden-like” spaces of these so-named complexes had great appeal to young family-oriented transplants. The boxy buildings on concrete slabs with nearly flat roofs were easily framed by local carpenters. Even the arrival of components in the Sixties had little impact on these projects. In fact, solid sawn floor joists are still prevalent in new apartment construction in Southern California. Floor trusses didn’t enter the apartment arena until the Seventies, and not in California.
Throughout this period of rapid growth, California continually tightened building codes, culminating in the 1970 ICBO edition that mandated considerably larger truss plates and mandatory in-plant truss inspection. Stringent code enforcement and escalating land costs pushed developers to other attractive markets, which they found in the Southeast. In Texas, the oil boom created similar demands for housing but without either restrictive codes or high land prices. Truss pioneer Charlie Barns had begun cracking the single family market with mass production of “cookie-cutter” Fox and Jacobs’ tract housing in Dallas. But early in the Seventies, his attention shifted to Houston, oil’s epicenter. Like California though, Houston’s single family builders did not embrace trusses (and still don’t). Typical roofs were framed with 24’ 2x6 #3 Southern Pine rafters braced down through interior walls bearing on concrete slabs. Site labor was plentiful.
In the early 1970s, the introduction of floor trusses changed all that. Charlie Barns and his partner, Dick Rotto, formed Trussway Houston mainly to target multi-family development. Trussway catered to framers and capitalized on framers’ dissatisfaction with the poor performance of Southern Pine joists, especially in hot, humid Houston. They sold the uniformity of floor trusses and the incorporation of special framing details, like dropped top chord cantilevers. Developers were able to “blow and go” in Houston, transforming that city and other growing markets like Atlanta.
The large volume of multi-family housing starts attracted CMs across the country. Initially, the barriers to entry were minimal. Manual component saws and now-antiquated flip jigs could competitively produce large volumes of trusses. Full units of lumber could be cut without adjusting saw setup. Likewise, hundreds of trusses could be assembled without breaking a jig setup. In the project shown here, for example, hundreds of units could be fabricated with only a dozen setups. Full truckloads of single truss types could be dropped expeditiously in large jobsite holding areas.
In the late 1970s, multi-family starts rose steadily, and, by 1980, CMs had invested heavily in the multi-family sector. Shelter Systems expanded to St. Louis, Denver, Houston, and Sacramento. Redman Industries, a modular producer, opened its TimberTech plants across the South. Trussway added plants in Austin and Ft. Worth. As large developers increased their reliance on trusses, so, too, did their ability to compare CMs prices “per square foot” on repetitive projects. However, as CMs began the 1980s, the stage was set for a prosperous multi-family truss sector.
Next Month:
Part Two: Systematizing Multi-Family Trusses