The long-awaited redevelopment of the former Immaculata High School in Uptown could begin next year. But the project’s team wants to raise capital by offering shares in the building through cryptocurrency.
Developer Keith Giles is partnering with the American Islamic College to convert the three-building school into apartments and build a 22-story senior housing tower on campus’ parking lot.
The school, designed by architect Barry Byrne, is both a Chicago and National Historic Landmark. It’s the first religious building Byrne designed on his own. The property at 640 W. Irving Park is a modern twist on Catholic architecture, with its arched windows that are much narrower than traditional Catholic churches.
Records show Giles purchased the school from American Islamic College for $6 million in August 2023, a year after the project won city approval. American Islamic College owned the property for nearly four decades, after the all-girls Catholic high school closed in 1981.
The campus had started housing migrants in July 2023. Chicago City Hall paid $6.2 million to lease the property to house 1,300 migrants. Their lease ends in early 2026, Giles said, and the team is hoping to start development “right away.”
Giles’ firm, K Giles, will convert the school into 235 apartments that will include studios, one- and two-bedrooms. The 1,000-seat auditorium will be transformed into a lounge and co-working space, with a cafe and office spaces. There will be a roof deck, and the gymnasium will become a modern exercise facility.
Called Immaculata Living, Giles said it wants the development to attract young working professionals looking to live near Lake Michigan.
“We’ll have some other amenity spaces tucked around the building because there’s just so much space,” Giles said. “We have a huge amount of outdoor space that surrounds the building. It’s a very large property.”
The second phase is the 22-story tower that will be in the middle of the site. American Islamic College owns that land, said Timothy Gianotti, the college’s president. During the sale of the school, the land was bifurcated to separate the school’s buildings from the parking lot.
The 192-unit senior living tower will have options for independent living, assisted living and memory care.
There’s demand for all types of housing in Chicago, but Giles said senior living will minimize the site’s impact on the neighborhood since senior housing often needs fewer parking spaces.
“We believe that demographic support [is there] for any kind of housing that we built here because there is such a need on all sectors,” Giles said. “We feel like we’re going to rent up very quickly here when we deliver the buildings.”
The apartment project is expected to take about 18 months, and construction of the senior living building will take 24 months, Giles said.
The American Islamic College will then move to a new campus in Rogers Park, according to Gianotti. But the college still plans to have a presence in Uptown, offering non-degree courses to Immaculata Living residents.
“We’re thinking of courses in literature and history and languages and all kinds of exciting things that will be easy for us to offer the wider community,” he said. “We’ll be able to offer that as a service and as an enhancement to the new ecosystem that’s coming into being there.”
In an effort to raise funding for the $210 million project, the American Islamic College partnered with London-based Neem Capital to allow investors, including a handful of EB-5 investors, to buy into the project using cryptocurrency.
Investors can buy a share that’s equal to an apartment unit and earn returns from the rental income. The minimum investment amount is $200,000, according to the development team.
The group estimates annual returns of 7% to 10%, and investors can cash out their funds or cash out through stablecoin and other forms of cryptocurrency.
“The goal isn’t for this to entirely be and to remain in the crypto world, but that the crypto investment is going to be the main vehicle by which the raise … for the project is realized,” Gianotti said.
The project team said it’s accepting cryptocurrency because many digital asset holders have shown interest in owning real-world assets without the cost of liquidating their holdings.
“With a lot of cryptocoins … you have quite significant volatility. So [investors are] looking to buy more stable assets,” Mohammed Marikar, partner at Neem Capital, said.
The capital raise will open soon, according to Marikar. The team is in conversation with a few “anchor investors,” who will invest in the project before it opens to the public.