Skender Completes Construction on Fifth City Commons Affordable Housing Complex in East Garfield Park

Skender, serving as the general contractor, recently completed construction on Fifth City Commons, a 43-unit, 60,000-square-foot affordable housing complex located at 3155 West 5th Avenue on Chicago’s West Side. The new complex will provide affordable housing to East Garfield Park residents with incomes ranging from 30% to 80% of the area’s median income, and all units were built to Passive House standards of sustainable energy use.

The Fifth City Commons site was vacant land for decades. As a part of the global C40 Reinventing Competition for Cities, which encourages municipalities around the world to use vacant land for sustainable, net-zero redevelopment, the City of Chicago selected the site for redevelopment in 2019. Sitting at the gateway to a part of Garfield Park called Fifth City, the 1.5-acre development was named after this geography to honor the community development organization of the same name that was active in the neighborhood throughout the 1960s.

Construction on the property began in July 2023 and was completed in November 2024. The new, three-story facility includes community rooms, a resident terrace and fitness room, laundry facilities, and on-site management offices, in addition to 43 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments.

Designed as an all-electric facility, Fifth City Commons features mature landscaping, EV charging stations, and extensive bicycle parking. The building is also solar ready, which will allow for further reduction of energy costs for residents by providing a sustainable power source that aligns with the energy efficiency goals of Passive House principles. Pursuing Passive House certification required thorough planning and collaboration between Skender, the owner, and the architect, including continuous testing to ensure the building met strict standards for air tightness, an essential metric for Passive House compliance.

“This project marks a significant milestone for Skender, as Fifth City Commons is our first Passive House project,” said Brian Skender, Senior Project Manager and Team Leader at Skender. “In a testament to our team’s expertise and proficiency, we actually passed the air tightness test on our first attempt, an unprecedented achievement in the history of Passive House projects in Illinois.”

Skender and joint venture partner Ashlaur Construction collaborated with Nia Architects and Perkins&Will, and engineering firms dbHMS, Rubinos & Mesia Engineers, Omni Ecosystems, and TERRA Engineering. Tandem Ventures managed regulatory compliance and maximized community engagement to create local employment opportunities on the project, which reached minority-owned business enterprise (MBE) participation of 30%, and woman-owned business enterprise (WBE) participation of 10%, exceeding targets.