Students from Three Institutions Will Meet Nov. 13; Final Presentations in January

A plot of land near 39th Street and Michigan Avenue in Chicago could be the future site of a senior citizen housing complex that uses development ideas proposed by students at DePaul University, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and Kent State University, thanks to a unique multi-college real estate course and competition at DePaul this fall.

The course challenges MBA students from DePaul, architecture students from IIT and graphic design students from Kent State to combine their ingenuity in teams that will create competing senior housing facility development proposals tailored to the South Side site.

The land will be developed by a partnership formed by Davis Group LLC, Kimball Hill Homes, Walsh Construction and Mesa Development LCC. The leaders of these four firms – Allison S. Davis, David Hill, Dan Walsh and Richard Hanson, respectively – are all founding sponsors of the Real Estate Center at DePaul, which is presenting the course. Their partnership plans to build a senior housing development on a parcel located near a mixed-use housing redevelopment that they will construct on the site of the former Chicago Housing Authority Stateway Gardens housing complex. The developers will review the winning student team proposal and if the team’s ideas are viable, they may incorporate them into the real proposal for the senior citizen building site.

“We are delighted that students from these three universities will be studying this vibrant and changing community and will be competing on design and development proposals,” Davis said. “We look forward to seeing their ideas for this parcel, which will complement our 1,300-unit mixed-use Park Boulevard development on the site of the old Stateway Gardens.”

Finance Professor Susanne Cannon, director of the Real Estate Center at DePaul, said that no matter what happens with their proposals, students will gain valuable insights into real-life real estate design and development though the dynamic and highly interactive course. “Students will learn to successfully collaborate and tackle complex issues that affect their final project proposals,” she said. “These issues include demographic and market analysis, schematic design, subsidies and financing, marketing, branding and more.”

Cannon is team-teaching the Monday night course with Assistant Professor Thomas Gentry of IIT’s College of Architecture and Associate Professor David Middleton of Kent State’s School of Visual Communication Design.

Gentry said the real world and multi-disciplinary aspects of the course have proven popular with students at IIT, which is located on Chicago’s South Side, not far from the site where the senior housing facility will be built. “It allows students to deal with issues that are typically missing from academic architectural design projects, such as budgets, branding and client interactions,” he said.

Most of the course, which began Sept. 13, is being taught via Web-based, voice-activated video-conferencing technology that links students on the three campuses via Internet II for classes in real time. The three professors rotate as lecturers. About 20 students from each institution are enrolled in the course. For the senior housing project, the students are divided into eight competing teams.

Within the individual teams, the Kent State graphic design students will take the lead on branding, way-finding (building signage and other elements that help people navigate the facility), Web design and packaging of the final senior housing project proposals. The IIT architecture students will develop the schematic designs and build the physical models. The DePaul MBA students will develop the market and financial analyses for the projects. The students from the three universities will meet face-to-face Nov. 13 to work on the team projects.

Leading Chicago design and development professionals will visit the class and act as facilitators for each team. Many of these professionals are members of the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit education and research institute that created UrbanPlan, an intensive classroom exercise in land development that the students completed during the first part of the course, before they tackle the senior housing project.

The multi-college student teams will meet again in January to present their senior citizen housing models and marketing and financial proposals in a juried competition. Their final presentations will contain all the components of professional real estate proposals and presentations, including pro forma statements, design drawings, brochures and Web pages.

Kent State’s Middleton praised the course’s cross-discipline approach, aided by distance learning technology. “This unique approach uses new technology to broaden the knowledge base across disciplines, and in real time addresses the opportunities and constraints inherent in each area of expertise,” he said. “Plus, our trips to Chicago will allow Kent State students to learn from leading professionals in the area of brand development and environmental graphic design, view significant architecture, and work in interdisciplinary teams face to face.”

Media Contacts:
Robin Florzak, 312/362-8592, rflorzak@depaul.edu
IIT: Brad Perkins, 312/567-3202, perkinsb@iit.edu
Kent State: Ron Kirksey, 330/672-8535, rkirksey@kent.edu