Local affordable housing developer is first to build a multi-family Passive House

Last week I toured the first PHIUS-certified multi-family building in Chicago, developed by LUCHA. You can see the house at 1651 N Drake Ave. in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. It’s possibly the first multi-family building in Illinois certified by PHIUS.

The six-flat at 1651 N Drake Ave, developed by LUCHA, is certified by PHIUS.

If you’ll remember, I took you on a virtual tour of a graystone renovation in Hyde Park in January — it was certified by the Passivhaus Institute organization. Passive building design means changing how the building’s “envelope” is designed, constructed, and insulated. The goal is to make the building’s walls and windows nearly airtight so that warmed air stays inside in the winter, and cooled air stays inside in the summer.

There are also advanced air cooling and heating systems that exchange the heat from outgoing exhaust air from the bathroom and kitchens with fresh air from outside to warm the incoming air so it takes less energy to mechanically heat it.

(PHIUS, or Passive House Institute, is a USA-based organization and Passivhaus Institut is based in Germany; a difference between their certification standards is that PHIUS has regionally-specific metrics to achieve.)

What’s neat about LUCHA’s passive six-flat, designed by Landon Bone Baker, is that it has a twin that’s laid out identically but was built to the federal Energy Star standard. That sets up an appropriate condition for LUCHA to test the differences in energy usage; the most variable factor would be the behaviors of the families who live in the units and how they use energy.

The apartment building is part of LUCHA’s Tierra Linda project, which has built 45 new apartments in several buildings scattered around Humboldt Park — and all are within walking distance of a 606 access point.

The apartment I toured has a pretty typical kitchen, with an open floor plan between it and the airy and light-filled front room. A sign explains some of the energy saving design features. The back entrance has a novel bike parking set up using a Dero product. There’s a small yard adjoined by six parking spaces, including one accessible space (Chicago code requires one parking space per dwelling unit in most circumstances and 0.7 spaces per unit in government subsidized multi-family buildings). Photos by Steven Vance.

Charlene Andreas, LUCHA’s Director of Building Development, said that the rents will be the same but tenants of the Passive House building will receive some additional education about the energy-saving components of their apartment. Like Mike Conners, the developer of the Hyde Park house, had told me, Andreas said many of the components had to be sourced from European manufacturers. Andreas commented that the price of construction could come down if there were more American makers certified by PHIUS.

The contractor, Linn Mathes, turned over the apartments to LUCHA last week so say hi to your new neighbors in Humboldt Park and ask how much they pay for electricity and gas!

Personal note

Some of you may have seen through other channels like my LinkedIn or Twitter profiles that I now work full time for MAP Strategies, where I’ve worked as an independent consultant for nearly four years.

Alongside Tim Barton, an attorney who specializes in land use entitlements, we will be expanding the company’s services to include urban planning, zoning, and land pre-acquisition analysis and recommendations.

Nothing will change with Chicago Cityscape. In fact, some of the work we do at MAP Strategies is accelerated (more efficient) because of the website. I encourage you to sign up for Cityscape Pro or Cityscape Enterprise if you want access to our exclusive Incentives Checker.