3831 W Chicago Avenue

3831 W Chicago is a city driven redevelopment, replacing a series of city-owned empty lots in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. This structure will deliver 60 affordable residential housing units to the quickly growing area and contribute to the city’s Invest South/West community improvement initiative. It will encourage investment in adjacent blocks by offering a vibrant redevelopment where Humboldt Park residents can live, shop, and socialize.

It is a 4-story, 70,000 square foot building planned with both a grocery store and community support space on the ground level, and 3 stories of residential above. The building will seek high sustainable accolades with two planned green certifications, Passive House US and Enterprise Green Communities. At this time, it is currently the largest planned Phius project in the city of Chicago. This project will also support a future rooftop PV Array system designed to reduce the carbon foot print of the building.

Through its human centered, data driven studio DataBased+, dbHMS provided Certified Passive House Consulting (CPHC) to support the design and development team in its efforts to meet the rigorous Phius 2021 certification program. This project is the first project to go through ComEd’s Affordable Housing New Construction, Passive Building Pathway, which was facilitated by early phase Phius feasibility modeling performed by dbHMS. During design, dbHMS developed and managed the WUFI Passive energy model, while running model iterations to assist the design team in optimizing design parameters and make cost effective informed decisions. Moving forward, dbHMS will manage the Phius submission process and continue to ensure that the constructed building meets all of the Phius requirements.