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Making Room Case Study: LISC’s La Casa
March 29, 2018
La Casa Complex. Image courtesy LISC Chicago.
Making Room: Housing for a Changing America spotlights a dozen case studies from around the nation, suggesting innovative ways to address the housing crisis. One of these issues is housing affordability—which affects the economic outlook for millions of families in urban, rural, and suburban communities alike.
There is a increasing need for flexible space that connects people to their communities, regardless of their incomes, even as their families grow and change.
One of the featured innovations is an affordable housing development for college students in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood—a lively immigrant community that is home to multi-generational families, artists, and entrepreneurs, just a few miles from the downtown business district.
Called La Casa, the development brings together young people from different universities in modern, off-campus housing that offers many of the resources they might find on campus—but allows them to stay in their community, close to their extended families. The objective was to expand affordable housing in the neighborhood, add vitality to the streetscape with a light-filled design, and support the aspirations of young people, many of whom are the first in their family to attend college.
“We’re responding to a student who would otherwise live in a crowded, two-bedroom apartment where the only quiet space they have to study is the bathroom or the kitchen, at midnight,” says Julio Guerrero, vice president of marketing and resource development at The Resurrection Project, a local nonprofit that developed the property. “It’s kids who would otherwise live at home. We want students to have a conducive learning environment [of the sort] that their peers might have on campus.”
The building’s top five floors house students in two- to three-bedroom suites with a living room and a kitchenette, with one resident advisor to a floor. An adjacent 6,000-square-foot building on 18th Place contains an education resource center, lounge, fitness and recreational space, classroom, and meeting space.
La Casa will provide mentoring for its residents to ensure that they succeed, given that relatively few family members or friends will be able to relate to their experiences, Guerrero says. He cites research showing that “while students may have been succeeding in high school, they were not well prepared for the rigor, discipline, and demands of college life.”
“The workload demands and expectations are completely different,” he adds. “We’re providing wraparound support services for them. Our on-site staff will organize and create workshops [about topics like] what it means to read at a college level.”
The goal is to lift barriers that typically make it hard for these students to stay engaged with their educations. “Our community has a significant high-school dropout rate and low college retention rates,” he says, noting 2010 citywide figures that show 35 percent of Latinos dropped out of high school–but only 8.9 percent earned a bachelor’s degree. “We want to make progress in breaking those trends.”
LISC Chicago is proud to have supported this effort; special thanks to LISC for their sponsorship of Making Room.
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