Net Positive Energy Home in Chicago
Last Updated: Mar 17, 2025When you think of living in Chicago, you might conjure up ideas of scandalously expensive heating bills that result from lake effect snow, whipping winds, and polar vortexes that push the temperature downwards towards Arctic levels. The thought of creating a net positive energy home that heats, cools, and powers itself without massive amounts of fossil fuel energy might seem like a feasible idea in New Mexico or Arizona. Still, the climate of Chicago (and especially those winters) might seem to require too much energy to stay warm.
A 2,900 square foot townhome located on North Leavitt Street in the Roscoe Village neighborhood of Chicago, however, is challenging many of the commonly held assumptions related to what is possible in terms of sustainable home construction in the Windy City.
Table of Contents
- The Goal: Net Positive Energy
- A Look at the Numbers
- Essential Home Features
- A Connection to Place
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A Connection to Place
We don’t usually think of homes in metropolitan areas having much of a connection to the regions where they are located. The urban landscape doesn’t offer an abundance of locally available raw materials for home construction as is possible in more rural and suburban areas. However, this net-positive energy home made a serious effort to utilize locally-sourced wood materials for the home construction.
Elm trees in the general vicinity that had been damaged by disease and previously cut down were utilized for the fronts of the kitchen cabinetry. This not only is an excellent example of reutilizing wood that would have otherwise been wasted, but it also allowed the home to proudly display a unique kitchen centerpiece with organic lines running parallel throughout the cabinet panels.
Most of the wood flooring in the home and the basement cabinets were sourced from reclaimed white oak wood that came from trees downed in a severe storm that hit the western side of Chicago several years ago. Walls in the den area of the home are covered by beautiful barn wood that was sourced from an old dairy farm in nearby southern Wisconsin. Another flooring throughout the home incorporates ceramic and porcelain tiles with large amounts of recycled content and simple, stained concrete floors.
Even in an urban and metropolitan area with extreme winter temperatures, this beautiful, net positive energy home is a testament to what sustainable design and construction can achieve.
Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.