Summer 2025 Ι Chicago Architect
In Chicago’s gentrifying and affluent neighborhoods, the struggle to build and preserve affordable housing is won through both penny-pinching resource efficiency and a willingness to open up the checkbook for more durable, long-lasting materials and finishes. The need to integrate supportive services is balanced by recreational amenities, especially when affordable and market-rate units are situated side by side. And as with all historic preservation projects, the charge to maintain a building’s historical integrity can come into conflict with functional constraints meant to combat a pervasive housing crisis.
The key to balancing all of these competing demands, as always, is design.
In recent years, Chicago architects have undertaken several ambitious affordable housing renovation projects, generating and preserving affordable units in historic buildings in some of the city’s most sought-after neighborhoods—places where affordable housing has been least likely to exist. This historical sensitivity may be legally mandated or a cultural consensus. It can also apply to prototypical and vernacular buildings, as well as singular outliers. But design ingenuity and a commitment to a democratic city are what bind them.
From the time it was built in 1931, Lawson House has been the largest supportive housing single-room occupancy (SRO) in the Midwest, and a decade-long crusade waged by Farr Associates Architecture and Urban Design and affordable housing developer Holsten has kept it so.
Once the tallest building in the city, this 24-story Art Deco tower in River North was designed by the firm of Perkins, Chatten, and Hammond, and its spare, proto-Modern details and stolid brick massing mark it as typical of Dwight Perkins’ masterful civic oeuvre. Landmarked as part of the renovation process to get access to historic tax credits, the former YMCA facility was built after Victor Lawson, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, made a $3.6 million donation to the organization, which Perkins and his colleagues formed into a crisp and tightly proportioned tower of limestone, gold-hued brick, and terra cotta trim.
At the time, the YMCA saw its properties as havens for 19th-century Victorian morality in the midst of explosive 20th-century urban growth, offering better living conditions for the hordes of young men trekking into Chicago as well as peaceable distraction from the corruption and vice they might find there. At Lawson House, there was a library, classrooms, a chapel, office space, and places for physical exercise. It was a regional showpiece designed to appeal to young white-collar professionals.
“The YMCA was seen as a dignified space [where] you could send your husband up to Chicago and they wouldn’t get into any trouble,” says Mercedes Miley, AIA, president at Farr Associates.
This demographic would not stay at Lawson House long, as its clientele got poorer and the building was neglected. By the late 1980s, more than 100 of its 583 sleeping rooms were out of service, for lack of maintenance. Peter Holsten bought the building for $1 in 2014. From the outset, Lawson House was to remain affordable housing, which required the largest-ever allocation of low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC) in Illinois history, just one part of its $129 million budget.
Construction began in late 2021, and residents, who were granted the right to return, moved out. Now that they’ve returned, they won’t spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
The transition from sleeping rooms with communal bathrooms to studio units with private kitchens and bathrooms dropped the number of units to 409. Remarkably, this significant increase in utility service was accompanied by a 40 percent reduction in water and energy usage. To achieve this, Farr Associates inserted 4.5 inches of insulation in the walls and installed energy-efficient windows. Mechanical systems (electrical, plumbing, and HVAC) were replaced, along with the addition of low-flow showerheads and toilets. Farr Associates estimates this will save $215,000 a year.
The state historic preservation office required the firm to maintain the original dimensions of the corridors, so Farr Associates tore out party walls and moved doors to accommodate the larger, approximately 150-foot units. The library was refurbished, as was one of the building’s gymnasiums. The basement barbershop was repurposed into a laundry room, and the pool into a community event space.
There are more amenities—and a green roof, designed by site design group, ltd.—on the 19th-floor roof deck. Here, the only exterior formal change to the building comes into view: three new vertical circulation corridors, a passenger and freight elevator, and two emergency egress stairs. Clad in tan aluminum, they mimic the rest of the building’s terraced massing.
A guiding principle for Miley was to make durable material choices that would ensure the building could serve residents as far into the future as possible, even when it meant spending more money upfront. “Someone who’s been experiencing homelessness may not be used to having a laundry facility,” says Miley. “They may wash their clothes in the sink and throw them on the floor to dry. The bathrooms have floor drains independent of the shower, so if someone forgets to turn off the shower or if they clog the toilet, it doesn’t damage the building.” The bathroom flooring material, for example, is poured epoxy, which is easily mopped and allows the drain to be placed anywhere.
Throughout the building, Miley and her team reused materials and decorative details that conjure the past life of the building as a reassuring presence, like metal grills hung in the lobby and gold floral molding in the library.
Social, educational, and supportive spaces, aimed at addressing the needs of recently unhoused individuals who comprise a significant portion of the resident community, are located on the second floor, adjacent to the building management offices. Next door are a series of thematically assertive rooms, originally done up in Tudor, Florentine, and Modern style. In an Americana frontier-themed room, log cabin wall panels are lacquered to rustic perfection. Miley explains their historical origin as pre-Internet experiential tours of different places and times that might be an engaging curio for a visiting Nebraskan, and their preservation still makes them perfectly serviceable as meeting and counseling spaces. These rooms are certainly quirky—and seemingly superfluous. But closer examination, in context with the omnipresent restored Art Deco detailing, demonstrates a purpose: “Everything comes with the intention of not making [it] feel institutional,” says Irene Burke, director of development at Holsten.
Sometimes this lack of institutional allusion is very literal. Interior paint was chosen so as not to overlap with colors associated with local hospital systems, to avoid healthcare trauma triggers. The lobby and corridors tend toward bright pastels. Units are the “brightest white we could find,” Miley says, to make them seem bigger.
The most visually impressive restoration feat at Lawson House is its chapel, where a strong sense of old and new handicrafts creates a meditative and dignified place for reflection. After original panels were destroyed during multiple flood events during construction, Farr Associates brought in local artists to paint sylvan motifs combining Rococo whorls with bracing deco modernity on panels in between thick wood ceiling beams. These hang above a pencil-thin altar, where monks are depicted kneeling in prayer, surrounded by a heliotropic burst. There is far more travertine, original and new, than CMU block, and tiny moments of discovery, like the nautical-themed tiles in the former pool, abound. Again and again, Farr Associates’ preservation work calls residents’ attention upward, toward a history and life beyond what their current struggles might be.
Given the long gestation of this project, a community of people has emerged around this historic artifact, driven by a vital social mission. “It’s been fascinating to see the number of people connected to the building,” Miley says, “and just feeling like you’re one little ant that’s been part of a larger ecosystem has been really gratifying.”
This ecosystem of housing conversions is certainly growing in Chicago. Burke says the city-sponsored LaSalle Corridor Revitalization program—originally launched in 2022 to spark mixed-income residential development along the historic commercial street—is “absolutely spurred by this example.” The program’s emphasis on turning vacant office towers into market-rate and subsidized housing, at a 30 percent minimum, reinforces her point. The first conversion at 79 West Monroe broke ground in March.
Architects at Ware-Malcomb are collaborating with developer R2 and owner Lagfin to convert floors seven through 13 into 117 residences, with 41 units (35 percent) designated as affordable. The 1905 tower, designed by Jarvis Hunt, features a long, rectangular floorplate, and these shallower depths allow light and air to penetrate the interior, making residential conversion more practical. Its stone and terra cotta façade is topped by upper stories of red brick.
Like many of the planned LaSalle Street conversions, the substantial addition of affordable housing at 79 West Monroe does not mean skimping on amenities. There is a bike room, a pet-washing station, a fitness center with sauna rooms, and a game and media room in the basement. The rooftop amenity floor features co-working spaces both indoors and outdoors. Inside, there are private phone call rooms and larger meeting spaces that can double as a dinner party venue for residents.
“Neoclassical Nautical” is the aesthetic regime; a navy, ivory, gold, and bronze color scheme with warm wood notes. Mark Schwamel, FAIA, Ware-Malcomb’s director of interior architecture and design, wanted to evoke luxurious, sculpted wood finishes, like a boat, with materials and patterns that emulate subtle, wave-like movement. “We really were fascinated by the connection to the lake, because given the scale of our units within urban living, we really wanted the development to use the city and its lakefront as their playground and outdoor space,” he says.
His mission was to “keep the beauty of the building, but also bring it up to a 21st-century modern multi-family living experience,” he says—an experience inclusive of affordable housing.
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Like Lawson House, 79 West Monroe was landmarked to apply for historic tax credit funding. This option was not available to the client and architects of Casa Veracruz, a series of scattered-site affordable housing renovations commissioned by The Resurrection Project (TRP). And that, says Guacolda Reyes, TRP’s Chief Real Estate Development Officer, is a good thing.
“When you apply for those types of credits, another set of architectural requirements comes with it, and most of the time it makes the project even more expensive,” she says.
In recognition of its singular composition of workers’ cottages, two- and three-flats, and industrial buildings overlaid with ancestral central European buildings and Mexican-American flourish, Pilsen was deemed a historic district in the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. But a 2020 plan to create a landmark district with formalized renovation and demolition protections never garnered community support and subsequently failed. TRP has been building and preserving affordable housing for more than 30 years, but saw the landmark district as a potential “tool of displacement,” Reyes says, that would make repairs to historic buildings onerous financial obligations. “I was happy that we didn’t have to comply with that,” she says.
But Casa Veracruz is no less a work of preservation, maintaining 155 units across 15 buildings as affordable housing in Pilsen, Little Village, and Back of the Yards, guided by Canopy. This project, which began in 2015 and was completed in 2021, honored the simple, vernacular fabric of these places: three-flats and industrial warehouses—some of which were over a century old—amid rapid gentrification and displacement.
In a city where world-famous crises of public housing have been known to arise because of the disregard for proper funding for maintenance, Canopy founder and Little Village native, Jaime Torres Carmona, AIA, calls these modest renovation projects the “chance of a lifetime in many ways.” And he’s not upset about Reyes’s lack of commitment to regulatory preservation: “She was such a steward not only of affordable housing, but also the preservation of significant buildings,” says Torres Carmona.
Before Canopy’s involvement, these Casa Veracruz buildings were all owned by TRP, and some had been renovated by Weese Langley Weese decades ago. Many of the units were funded by the LIHTC program, and as TRP’s compliance period came to an end, they once again had to gather funding and package a deal to keep these units in working order. “It’s like starting all over again,” Reyes says. Casa Veracruz’s budget was $28.7 million, with an average construction cost per unit of $150,000.
The repairs were practical and occasionally dramatic. Interior finishes in units and common areas were replaced, windows swapped out, and building systems upgraded. If Torres Carmona could slot in an extra foot of kitchen counterspace, that was a win. In some ways, it was a wide-ranging job. The smallest building had three units, while the largest had 52.
Torres Carmona says the smaller buildings often required the most intricate repair jobs, like Casa Chiapas in Pilsen. Located next to the ‘L’, a structural analysis revealed that the constant rumbling of trains accelerated its settling into the ground. Working with structural engineer CE Anderson, Canopy proposed placing a tensioned steel cable between the interior wall and façade to hold the building together. The rattling train traffic also loosened connections between the exterior fire escape and the masonry wall, so it was demounted, dismantled, repaired, and tied back through the walls. “It was like open heart surgery to get the frames back into good shape,” says Torres Carmona.
It’s all subtle repairs—from the outside. “If we’re successful, people from the neighborhood will notice very little change on the outside, but residents using the spaces inside the building will really notice a drastic change,” he says.
This meant making material choices that were initially more expensive but would require less maintenance in the long run. The apartments feature solid surface countertops instead of polyurethane laminate veneer and synthetic marble in the bathrooms. The lighting systems are LEDs.
Torres Carmona sees this level of quality as a measure of neighborhood stability. Paying more money upfront and designing for durability can “allow [residents] to stay longer,” he says.
In Pilsen, especially, the ferocity of real estate development is making access to the neighborhood a very transient thing. “We are losing the battle,” says Reyes. “I think it’s critical that we preserve our physical assets in a way that they are not displacing anybody, that we are improving the quality of housing and the quality of life of the residents that we serve.”
She began her career in affordable housing development when cheap housing—and abhorrent conditions—were plentiful in Pilsen. Now, Pilsen is a destination for recent immigrants and young professionals alike, the latter at the expense of the former, and the housing stock reflects this. “What we want for our families is that they can have both—that they can have a decent home that they’re proud of, but also a home that they can afford without sacrificing any of their basic needs,” says Reyes.
Here and at Lawson House, planning for long-term durability and maintenance is a lesson learned from past disasters in subsidized housing. Chief among them are the Chicago Housing Authority’s doomed high-rises that pancaked to the ground in the largest-ever demolition of public housing in American history in the first decade of the 21st century. To even begin to repair the legacy of this catastrophe, the city must offer up its best to all, not just with faith, but also with design acumen, regulatory structures, funding pipelines, and summoned political will.
Only then will a more democratic and accessible city be possible.