Chicago artist Thomas Plum’s two-story house has three bedrooms, two baths and an open concept main floor. It also has cork flooring, plants on the roof and a wall hung with bottled water to help warm the house in winter.
Hardly a typical new home, the residence with 1,200 square feet and a 600-square-foot basement was named one of 2004’s Top Ten Green Projects by the American Institute of Architects. The house won two Design Excellence awards for the Chicago office of Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis from the Chicago AIA chapter.
It is one of five homes — and the most avant-garde — built in the small Green Homes for Chicago pilot project aimed at spotlighting affordable energy-efficient and environment-friendly housing.
Others might consider the home different, even weird, but first-time buyer Plum is delighted at his good fortune. He paid $145,000 for the residence in the Hermosa neighborhood west of Logan Square. He moved in in January on what he remembers as “the coldest day of the year.”
Plum had been renting for seven years in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood and had been looking to buy for months. A “visual and sound artist” who works at Columbia College, he was looking for “something under $200,000” and had shopped for property from Rogers Park to McKinley Park, always arriving just as prices were on the upswing.
When architect friends told him about the Green Homes pilot project, he applied to Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, the not-for-profit developer of the Green Homes.
The Green Homes pilot was a twist on the city’s New Homes for Chicago program, which over the last 14 years has fostered development of about 2,000 affordable housing units on city land. Under the program, prices are capped at $155,000 for a single-family home or condo. In some cases, qualifying buyers can get grants towards the price of the house.
To qualify for the program, buyers must meet certain income requirements. For example, a family of four with an income of no more than $90,480 would be allowed to purchase one of the homes. In addition, a family of four making $54,400 or less can apply for extra financial assistance.
“We’ve tried to do them with environmental awareness and to participate in a state program for energy efficiency,” said Chicago Housing Commissioner John Markowski of the housing built in the New Homes program. The Green Homes project was “a joint effort of (the city’s Department of) Housing and the Department of Environment to generate new ideas, develop showcases for those ideas and learn what can we take away from the experience.”
The city sponsored a national design competition in 2000 which garnered 73 proposals. Five plans were selected for construction and sale. All the homes have three bedrooms and one or two baths and were designed to fit on a standard 25- by 125-foot city lot donated by the city. Three houses were built in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side and two in the Hermosa neighborhood. All were sold within the past year.
The intersection of affordable and “green” — defined as saving energy and natural resources — can be difficult, however.
Despite the competition’s goal of building houses for $115,000, $125,000 and $175,000 — the houses overall cost $200,000 or more, Markowski said. And those figures do not include land (which the city donated) and achitecture fees, waived as part of the contest. Add in a number of donated, pricey components such as high-tech toilets to conserve water — and these showcase homes are not likely to become the affordable green homes of the future. Lessons learned from the project will be part of a “green” building standard to be announced next year for city-assisted developments, Markowski said. Those living in the houses now may provide some clue to that future. Homeowner Plum says he has been mostly comfortable in the most radical design dubbed the “F10” house because, compared to a conventional new home, it attempts to reduce the environmental impact by a factor of 10.
The foundation is made of a concrete with fly ash, a waste product from coal-fired power plants, not Portland cement. The roof is planted with sedum to insulate the building, absorb heat and water. The home is heated by a hot water baseboard system using a high-efficiency gas-fired boiler, but there is no air conditioning, because AC is an energy hog.
The stairwell is designed as a “solar chimney.” The roof over the stairwell is raised above the regular roof with clerestory windows facing south. Fans are mounted on the ceiling. In the summer the fans and opened windows exhaust hot air and cool the house. In the winter, the windows capture light to heat bottles of water mounted on the wall like a modern art installation and the fans force the heat down for additional warmth.
“I grew up with gas [forced air] heating so I was cold at first,” until he learned how to regulate the baseboard heating system , he said.
Like many former renters, he was startled by his gas bill one month — $150 — but a check with his parents in Michigan convinced him that was not unusual.
He likes the abundance of natural light in the home, and during the summer was not uncomfortable even without air conditioning.
There are fans in most rooms and movable transoms on the bedroom doorways, which improve air flow.
“The privacy and ventilation with air flow is great,” he said. Plum added, “It is not a silent house.” Some of the fans are noisy and the stairway acts as an echo chamber. Furthermore, he sometimes can hear the neighbors, sounds he does not remember from growing up in a bricks and mortar house.
“The noise factor may not be so noticeable for those who grew up in frame housing,” he said.
“It is an experimental house so there are some different issues for maintenance,” Plum said. He has concerns about finding and storing a ladder to clamber up 35 to 40 feet to periodically weed the roof.
And then there’s the question of the water bottles hung on the wall. “I have yet to figure out how to dust these. …,” Plum said. “One only hopes when in time these bottles yellow and crack they will still have the same bottles to fit in the holders.” Not all of the designs in the Green Homes project are as radical as Plum’s. The Englewood home owned by Robert and Jeannyne Mendez is in many respects the most traditional looking of the five. It was designed by William Worn, principal at Worn Jerabek Architects, Chicago, who focused on combining energy efficiency and creating high indoor air quality, which can be a problem with some common building materials.
Worn’s firm does from 200 to 400 affordable housing units each year, but “we found that our clients were not doing well in some of our projects. They were like canaries in coal mines” with reactions to the indoor air quality.
“We were very careful about the materials that went into the house” and attempted to eliminate any with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) “at all costs.” VOCs, which release traces of chemicals that irritate especially sensitive people, are in many building components including sheathing, caulks, paints, adhesives and kitchen cabinets.
Tightly built houses do not have cracks and crevices for heat — or VOCs — to escape. To solve the problem of how to bring fresh air into the house 12 months a year without losing heated air in the winter, Worn turned to a thousand-year-old technology called a wind tower.
On the Mendez house it looks like a chimney with vents.
“We are able to control the amount of fresh air exiting the house” through control of the vents, he said.
The 1,400-square-foot, two-story frame house has three bedrooms and two baths. In addition to being energy efficient, it is handicapped-accessible. It does not have a basement.
The intent was to build the residence for $125,000, but Worn said it is difficult to ascertain how much the house really cost — or might cost if replicated because a number of components including windows, bamboo flooring, appliances and a sophisticated water-saving toliet were donated.
“It was difficult at the time (2000 and 2001) to find some of the products” used in construction, he said. But the technology and demand for such products is changing so quickly that they would be easy to find now.
The Mendezes bought the house for under $130,000 and, with their two children, moved in last April.
They had shopped for a home from the West Side to the South Side of the city, but couldn’t find anything in their price range. They had considered a condo, but decided that might be too small with two children and a dog.
They leapt at the opportunity to buy a Green Home from Neighborhood Housing Services. Soon after moving in, anticipating a hot summer, they installed air conditioning. But Jeannyne Mendez said they did not use it. And though there is no standard test for air quality, their 10-year old boy, once subject to asthmaattacks, had not had an episode since they moved in.
The family is using two large walk-in closets, which could be converted to a shaft for a chair lift or elevator, for storage. And this winter they anticipate utility bills considerably smaller than those in the two-bedroom Pilsen apartment where they lived for three years.
“We were paying $200 and $300 a month for heat in the winter,” Jeannyne Mendez recalled. “And we had to plug in electric heaters and pile on three and four comforters.”
