The Pension Institution for Officers, later to become the Mental Employees Insurance Institution in Lviv, was one of the first institutions to undertake a large-scale building initiative with its own funds after the war. It was intended to address the housing deficit, as a secure investment of capital and as a kind of social benefit of the institution towards its employees.

In the second half of the 1920s, the Pension Institution for Officers built several housing complexes in various Polish cities. In Kraków, a massive block of flats on Slowackiego Avenue and a famous expressionist house at 6 Inwalidów Square were built, as well as a large building for seventy-eight flats in Biala and a smaller one in Bielsko. All of ZPF's non-Lviv developments were designed by the Krakow architect Wacław Nowakowski (1888-1955), while the two large buildings in Lviv were designed by Witold Minkiewicz (1880-1961).

The first of these was a complex at 24-26-28-28a Na Bajkach Street (now Kyiv Street), stylistically a distant echo of Expressionism. Demand for the flats was huge, as evidenced by the fact that five hundred and seventy applications were submitted for the forty-two flats given over on 1 October 1927, to which only those employed by the Penny Factory were entitled. The flats were of two, three and four rooms (161 rooms in total, including kitchens); each building had four laundries and two caretaker's flats. Due to the economics and speed of construction, it was possible to significantly reduce the cost of the flats. The only thing that could not be realised due to the increase in the price of building materials was the central heating system.

However, it was possible to introduce other innovative solutions, one of which was the abandonment of the closed plan and the resulting dark, damp courtyard-studios, which usually overlooked both the kitchen windows and some of the rooms. The central building in the complex was set back from the existing building line, which allowed for the construction of an additional floor. In the side buildings, however, the top storey is covered by a mansard roof. This made it possible to act in accordance with the building regulations and to maintain the development standards, according to which the new building could not exceed the neighbouring buildings.

Almost immediately after the houses on Na Bajkach Street, Minkiewicz designed a second, larger and more modern residential complex at 36-42 Stryjska Street: reinforced concrete, with square windows, smooth white walls and terraced roofs. Due to Minkiewicz's penchant for monumental and classicising forms, this was not a fully purist building - while the floors foreshadow the 'classic' functionalism of the 1930s, the ground floor featured richly textured and coloured clinker brick decoration, alluding to the Kraków expressionist ZPF project at 6 Inwalidów Square, by Wacław Nowakowski.

The complex at Stryjska Street contained eighty-six flats located in three blocks: in the six-storey central part and in two five-storey side wings.

Together they form a deep cour d'honneur with transverse passages. A large number of loggias and balconies are envisaged due to the hillside location opposite Stryysky Park. In one such flat on the ground floor, the later oppositionist Jacek Kuroń was born and lived for the first ten years of his life.