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Chicago’s public library system had a vision. It was the mid-2010s, and many libraries had been built across the city in recent years. They were modestly designed cookie-cutter branch locations that made up for what they lacked in size and resources by being located within walking distance of most of the city’s residents. The Chicago Public Library (CPL) wanted to build off this momentum. Former CPL Commissioner Andrea Telli says the system envisioned creating the 21st-century library, a multifunctional institution that would have a much broader mission than lending books. This new kind of library would support economic development, nurture learning, engender or support community, and provide social services needed in the area. The vision was grand. But what CPL didn’t have was the budget to pull it off.
In late 2016, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed a unique solution. CPL would be able to realize its 21st-century library by joining forces with partners who could access the funding to get stuff built: housing developers. By coupling new projects—federally subsidized affordable apartment buildings with libraries co-located on the same site or even within the same building—the city could get more housing, and the library system could get more of the ambitious libraries it envisioned. And by giving communities the well-designed library branches residents already wanted, the city was more easily able to garner support for affordable housing projects that neighbors often oppose.
A design competition was launched, and some of the city’s most notable architects pitched ideas. Less than three years later, three of these housing-library combinations were opened, creating a total of 161 new apartments for seniors, Chicago Housing Authority residents, and some market-rate renters. The most striking of these projects is the Independence branch and apartments in Chicago’s Irving Park neighborhood. With 44 subsidized affordable apartments available specifically to seniors, a light-filled two-story library, and a shared courtyard in the back, Independence is the model of the 21st-century library CPL had envisioned. “If you’re trying to strengthen community and community engagement, it’s a wonderful concept to have senior apartments above a library building,” says Telli.
This approach of fusing community amenities and housing is catching on. Independence and the two other housing-library combinations in Chicago are just a few of the growing number of housing projects being built with community-forming spaces, social services, or the leisurely “third places” people crave outside their homes and jobs.
Many, but not all, of these projects are affordable housing developments, and this method of building homes alongside a diverse array of amenities is being used across the country. In the Bronx, the Peninsula is a mixed-use project that combines affordable apartments, incubation space for food-related startups, and a community-serving grocery store into a cluster of contemporary mid-rise buildings. Columbus, Ohio, has Gravity, a multipronged housing community encompassing mindfulness, mental health, and wellness providers, with modern residences, offices, and retail spaces built around the kinds of common areas that might host a movie night or a food truck. In Santa Fe, Siler Yard is an affordable live/work development for artists in low-rise apartments and townhomes oriented around a plaza. And in Seattle, Gardner House and the Allen Family Center is a multitextured housing complex built to accommodate the unique needs of families who have experienced homelessness.
These projects are broadening the concept of mixed-use development—the archetypal housing above ground-floor retail—with a more deliberate pairing of the kinds of services, resources, and amenities residents want and need. A new genre of multifunctional, social-leaning projects is rewriting the housing playbook. With innovative designs backed by mold-breaking financing, these projects are creating new pathways for multifunctional and community-forging projects, at both affordable and market rates. They’re showing that housing can be redesigned to do much more than put a roof over someone’s head.
In a country where building affordable housing has gradually fallen to the fringes of civic responsibility, the method of binding affordable residential development with community-serving amenities has found surprising currency.
Not every co-located housing project is affordable by nature, but many are mission-driven in one form or another. In Seattle, Gardner House and the Allen Family Center is a standout example of a do-good project. It’s an attractive eight-story building, with 95 apartments, an interior courtyard and playground that look out over the street, and a community room and kitchen for events. Developed as a public-private partnership between the City of Seattle and the national nonprofit developer Mercy Housing’s Northwest regional office, with a critical $30 million funding grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and $5 million from the city, the project was designed with a particular community in mind. The apartments are set aside for families that have recently experienced homelessness, and a significant amount of ground-floor square footage houses a novel community resource center targeting those at risk of or experiencing homelessness. The resource center concentrates the multiple government and support agencies used by these populations, making it easier for a family to access help from various social services that are rarely coordinated with each other and often located in disparate places. “We created a one-stop shop for all these different resources,” says Colin Morgan-Cross, director of real estate for Mercy Housing Northwest.
Located on a trapezoidal lot, the building has a welcoming plaza on one end, and its yellow-accented windows present a sunny face toward the light-rail that runs directly alongside. The 8,000-square-foot community resource center, also carrying yellow accents on its facade, takes up the entire ground floor of the building. It’s an unusually large amount of space for a project to devote to social services, which are typically shunted into tiny corners on the rare occasions that developers include them in their plans. For Mercy Housing, though, it’s a somewhat common commitment. The organization was founded by a group of nuns in Omaha in 1981, and community-serving amenities are included in many of its developments. Morgan-Cross says the organization works with its projects’ architects to find ways to create community-serving spaces by repurposing parts of the floorplan that are less than ideal for residential units, particularly those on the ground floor. Gardner House, designed by Seattle-based Runberg Architecture Group, sits at the corner of two busy arterial streets and near multiple transit lines, so street-facing ground-floor spaces with minimal residential appeal became the Allen Family Center. “It wasn’t about giving up another use,” Morgan-Cross says. “It was about meeting a need.”
The services provided on site are varied and are intended both for residents and for members of the community at large. The center offers homelessness prevention and housing placement, financial stability and job training, mental and behavioral health treatment, and naturalization and legal services oriented toward immigrants and refugees.
This may sound like the altruistic, bleeding-heart work of an organization founded by nuns, but Morgan-Cross says dedicating space to these services makes sense for the residents and Mercy Housing alike. Resident services staff are employed by the project, serving almost like housing-focused social workers. They help residents keep on track with rent and utility payments and operate an eviction prevention program to help residents keep their apartments while reducing turnover for Mercy Housing Northwest.
The concentration of services at Gardner House serves several purposes, not least of which is satisfying the needs of the specific community of residents living there. Morgan-Cross says Mercy Housing’s projects will continue to include these kinds of services and amenities going forward but probably not at this scale. The concept is replicable, in theory, he says. “I just wish it was also replicable to get major philanthropic grants every time we needed them.”
In Chicago, the library-housing combination projects were realized largely because they were pet projects of the city’s powerful mayor. When the design competition launched in late 2016, the architects and developers competing separately for the projects could be confident they’d get built. As one of few cities with its own allocation of coveted 9 percent federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, which end up covering about 70 percent of project costs, Chicago had valuable tools at its disposal. As mayor, Emanuel had significant sway in determining which projects received those 9 percent tax credits, as well as other city and state housing funds.
The mayoral support and ambitious programming attracted the city’s leading lights of design, including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Perkins+Will. In total, 32 firms competed for the three library-housing combination projects the city was pursuing.
For the Independence branch, the city’s evaluation committee selected a design by Chicago-based John Ronan Architects, which stacked and segmented the two parts of the six-story building. The concrete-and-glass library is pulled up to the property line on a busy street, and the bright-gray four-story apartment block for low-income seniors sits farther back. Colorfully accented windows pop out from the apartment’s corrugated metal facade, and full-height windows line both lengths of the library, pouring natural light into a reading room with an impressive 40-foot-high ceiling. “I want people walking into that library to feel important, and to feel this is an important institution,” Ronan says.
The 16,000-square-foot library and 44-unit apartment building cost a total of $33.4 million and bring an award-winning piece of contemporary architecture to Irving Park. From the street, residents can look up to the multicolored balconies that pop out from the bright facade and point to their units. Color is used as a tool for both resident pride and neighborhood engagement. “One of the agendas of the project as I saw it was to change how people think about affordable housing and be more welcoming of it in their communities,” Ronan says.
Ronan’s firm was paired with Evergreen Real Estate Group, which had been selected to develop two of the three library-housing projects based on a still-baking plan for financing them. The timeline called for projects to be under construction by 2018.
“While we had a lovely competition-winning design in March of 2017, we didn’t have anything else,” says David Block, director of development for Evergreen Real Estate Group. The site needed entitlements, community outreach had not yet begun, and there was no formal financing plan nor lender to make Evergreen’s side of the funding available. “We had to do all that in essentially nine months.”
The crunched timeline made for a challenging design and development process, but Ronan came with some relevant experience. His firm had previously designed a few high schools with public library branches on site. “It was kind of in our sweet spot,” he says.
To ensure each component of the project had its own identity and didn’t feel tacked on to the other, Ronan used contrasting facade treatments and staggered the volumes. At the rear of the building, the library’s second floor juts outward to create a green terrace, which is intended for the residents but is also used occasionally by the library, forming a unique shared civic space. “Let’s take advantage of these two types of buildings coming together and create a place where people can interact,” Ronan says of that design move.
Co-location is only part of the recipe. For these two buildings to actually complement each other, Ronan says the project teams had to put extra effort into drafting guidelines for exactly how the two different audiences could use the space, and under what circumstances. “It’s not enough to envision it and design it,” he says. “You have to think through the policy aspect of it.”
Block’s company is currently in the process of developing two other housing-library combinations in Colorado and Massachusetts. They’re signs that projects like these don’t necessarily need a political bigwig as their champion nor an infusion of philanthropic largesse to take shape.
The federal tax credits used to develop the Chicago project require Block’s company to hold the property for 15 years, but he expects to keep it in his portfolio for much longer. “The building is full and stays full because people like living there,” Block says.
Wendy Jo Harmston was one of the project’s first residents, and she has no plans to leave. A voracious reader, Harmston says she checks out three or four books a week from the library and uses its computers. She knows the staff there now, and residents in the building know she can usually be found downstairs in the reading room. “I rarely miss a day,” she says.
A former community organizer who has lived in the area for years, Harmston was part of the chorus of neighbors calling for a library to be built on that site, where a previous library had burned down. Although not expecting to, she ended up needing the affordable rent the building’s apartments provide. Like many of her fellow senior residents, the building is allowing her to age in a place she knows. And she’s starting to know the people, too. A community is gradually taking shape among the people who have found themselves living in this novel kind of building, one made especially for them. “We’re all in a certain age group,” Harmston says. “It’s kind of neat that we’re experiencing new things. Not just different, but new.”
This article was first published in The State of Housing Design 2023, a book from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, which can be purchased here.
