The Generic Modular Prefabricated Tiny Home includes two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a veranda. The residence is customizable, expandable, and has an open floor plan with large windows.

Modular housing construction has been held back by complicated transportation challenges, but innovative processes and models are breaking through those barriers.

Greystar's proposal would be one of the largest modular-construction projects ever built in Massachusetts. It would go on a site now home to more than a dozen dilapidated 19th-century mill buildings.

But the modular, single-family home concept has been slow to gain traction in the Twin Cities metro area, with most of the single-family modular activity happening in outstate Minnesota.