Start 6: Roosevelt Square
Cost: $650 million

In one respect the Roosevelt Square residential community under way on Chicago's Southwest Side may be the largest of its kind in the nation.

The project on the site of the former ABLA Homes is one element of the Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion Plan for the Transformation of the city's public housing stock.

Don Biernacki, senior vice president of Chicago-based LR Development Co., a developer on the project, said Roosevelt Square is believed to be the largest Hope VI project in the United States. Hope VI, a program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, provides funding for severely distressed public housing.

A Large Project

The project is so immense that it will take eight to 10 years to complete.

The 100-acre site will hold 2,441 residences, Biernacki said. Plans call for affordable rental housing and affordable and market rate for-sale housing.

The project, which is southwest of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, covers 37 city blocks, and its borders are Cabrini Street on the north, Blue Island Avenue on the east, 15th Street on the south and Ashland Avenue on the west.

All housing will be multi-unit, ranging from three flats to 72-unit mid-rise buildings, Biernacki said.

The total project will raise about 425 to 450 buildings, though the first phase will involve the construction of only 38 rental buildings and 35 for-sale structures.

The masonry-heavy designs will reflect Chicago's solid urban flavor. But the six architecture firms on the project made sure to avoid a cookie cutter look.

"We didn't want one phase of one type of building, and the next phase to have one type of a different building," Biernacki said. Indeed, the team over each of the six project phases is drawing from 20 building designs and 50 unit types.

Some soil remediation is needed for the neighborhood that likely goes back to the incorporation of Chicago. Contaminated soil is being removed and replaced with clean fill.

Even with the new soil, the site conditions are a bit of a challenge because of the large number of buildings that had once been in the area, even before the presence of the CHA. As a result, all the new structures will be on mat-slab foundations, other than the mid-rise structures.

Accommodating the buildings to changes in Chicago's infrastructure has been an issue, Biernacki said.

"It's one thing when you do a single building and you run into a problem when doing a sewer or water tap," he said. "It's a whole new thing when you have 20 buildings with the same problem."

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