Eden House/Promise Place

Eden House/ Promise Place is a multi-use building that houses a day program for homeless women, residential addiction recovery programs, group homes for homeless women living with mental illness, transitional rental housing for program graduates, a wellness center, low-income rental housing, and an early childhood development center. The programs of N Street Village are distributed in five to eight story buildings that is responsive to contextual complexities. Frontage on three streets of varying character, relationships to surrounding buildings (including several historic landmarks) and the incorporation of four 19th century townhouses into the development, all influenced the building form.

Affordable housing, the largest and tallest building in the project, is located on the wide 14th Street mixed-use corridor. The supportive housing and associated services are located off an internal courtyard which opens onto N Street. New construction on this street is similar in height to both the historic N Street townhouses on the site and the Luther Place Church parish hall across the street. The early childhood development center, which is open to the community, is located on the ground floor of the Vermont Avenue frontage. This side of the building, scaled to match neighboring structures has a repetitive bay rhythm recalling the townhouse increment so prevalent on the immediate stretch of the avenue. The buildings surround a central courtyard, which serves as an organizing element for the entire project.


Source: Design Matters: Best Practices in Affordable Housing, City Design Center at the University of Chicago.