Jade Garden Apartments are located within a unique 16-acre mixed-use development called Chinatown Square, located in Chicago's Chinatown neighborhood. The Jade Garden development includes 72 rental units for low and moderate income families.

Formed specifically for this development, the Chinese American Development Corporation (CADC) is a consortium of local community and business people whose goal was to enhance Chicago's Chinatown neighborhood by developing a long unused land parcel formerly owned by the Santa Fe Railway.

CADC teamed with The Habitat Company to help realize this project. CADC and Cordogan, Clark and Associates Architects worked together to design Jade Garden in a manner that would enhance the neighborhood as well as meet the specific goal of providing new residences in which existing and older residents would choose to live. It was critical to the CADC consortium that older community residents remained in the neighborhood rather than moving elsewhere. The neighborhood's housing stock was aging, and was inadequate to accommodate the expanding population.

The architecture of Jade Garden uses defensible space concepts to clearly define and differentiate individual units and the zones belonging to them. The grouping of the townhouse and multifamily buildings creates semiprivate zones, or courtyards, which are afforded natural surveillance from the buildings that face them.