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IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — The Aspire at West Campus residence complex is the latest addition to University of Iowa housing — for now.
The $31 million public-private partnership that university administrators inaugurated this month is only the latest housing project at the university, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported (http://icp-c.com/1mY95CF ).
A new residence hall is scheduled to open in 2015 and at least one additional housing complex is likely to follow.
Booming enrollment in recent years led to the university spending millions leasing off-campus apartment buildings, including renting four off-campus properties for $2.5 million last school year. The college enrolled 31,065 students last fall, marking the seventh year the university had more than 30,000 students on campus.
And with officials in the middle of an aggressive multimedia marketing blitz trying to attract more in-state students, University of Iowa may need more beds.
University of Iowa's Senior Vice President and Treasurer Douglas True said a silver lining to the devastating 2008 flood was the forced redevelopment of outdated infrastructure.
"We got serious and we knew that we couldn't kick the can down the road in the long run," True said at the ribbon cutting ceremony for Aspire.
Eventually that led to negotiations with Balfour Beatty, an international, publicly traded development company based in London.
The Iowa state Board of Regents voted in 2011 to demolish the Hawkeye Court apartments. The 14-month construction process began last year.
Aspire at West Campus replaces student housing built in the 1960s with 270 one- and two-bedroom units targeting graduate students and university faculty. The Aspire facility contains five, three-story buildings totaling 265,600 square feet and cost about $31 million. The facility also includes a separate one-story community center with more than 5,400 square feet that houses a management office and common spaces, including a fitness center, a laundry facility and a multipurpose room.
Aspire resident and part-time employee Ben Roberson of Portland, Oregon, is starting his first year of law school at the university this fall.
Roberson said he considered off-campus housing, but renting a house would have been too expensive and most apartments around Iowa City he saw were run down, he said.
"A lot of them seemed old and dilapidated, and a lot of them had no real light," Roberson said. "I felt like I was going to live in a monk's hovel."
Roberson said he found only two on-campus housing alternatives that were less expensive than Aspire.
Rent at the new complex costs on average about 90 percent more than its predecessor. Last year, Hawkeye Court one- and two-bedroom apartments were listed, respectively, at $495 and $540. At Aspire, one-bedrooms are listed at $875 a month while two-bedrooms are priced at $1,100 a month.
The Hawkeye Court apartments were housing students at about 35 percent below market rate, said Von Stange, assistant vice president for student life and senior director of University Housing and Dining.
Stange said the original Hawkeye Court apartments were built with cinder block construction, which led to poor insulation and climate control. Because of their age, the buildings were grandfathered in by fire safety inspectors despite modern code violations, he said. Housing department representatives considered renovating rather than rebuilding, but estimates on renovation costs were greater than constructing new housing.
"So it was one of those where it was really the students liked it because it was inexpensive, but the costs to heat and cool the apartments were high and they just outlived their useful life," Stange said.
Hawkeye Drive, located about a half-mile southwest of Aspire, will continue to house students at least through the end of the 2015-2016 school year. After spring of 2016, the university housing department will consider decommissioning the roughly half-century old building, Stange said.
Aspire will house only graduate students and faculty, unlike Hawkeye Courts, which also housed undergraduates who were married or had children.
Rod Lehnertz, the university's director of planning, design and construction, said early indicators on the private-public partnership with Balfour Beatty are positive.
"When you do something like this, there's sort of a wait and see as far as the success, but they are 100 percent leased, and they were 100 percent leased even this spring," Lehnertz said. "So they've been a big success for us."
Stange said the Petersen Residence Hall, a $53 million, 10-story building under construction and scheduled to open in time for the fall 2015 semester, will house about 500 first- and second-year undergraduates.
Lehnertz said Petersen Hall will be unique as a "living-learning" community where every floor will have an academic theme.
"So every floor will be themed by either academic areas or interests, with the idea being the entire floor has students that are interested in similar academic pursuits," Lehnertz said. "So they really end up fully immersing themselves."
The new residence hall, the college's first since 1968, was named in recognition of Mary Louise Petersen, who was appointed to the Board of Regents in 1969 and served as board president from 1973 to 1981.
Stange said university officials are considering building additional housing on the east side of campus, possibly along Madison Street near the site of the old city water plant.
Colleen Shaull, assignments coordinator with University Housing and Dining, estimated that 140 students right now are in temporary housing such as residence hall lounges until permanent housing can be found. She said that number is likely to go down to about 30 by the end of October.
The college's president Sally Mason said there has never been abundant on-campus housing for students and advancing plans to build more student residences on the east side of campus would help meet student demand.
"We've always been sort of right on the edge of being able to handle the large freshman classes that we've been bringing in since I arrived, and it's only going to get harder in the future," Mason said.
The university last month rolled out an aggressive multimedia marketing blitz focused on attracting more in-state students after the Iowa state Board of Regents in June approved a new funding model that will tie a large part of state allocations to the three public universities to the number of Iowans enrolled. The college's freshman Iowa-resident enrollment was 48 percent last academic year, trailing both the University of Northern Iowa and Iowa State University.
Mason said she would not rule out the possibility of the university's next residence hall being a public-private partnership similar to Aspire.
"It will be a (regents) decision, obviously," Mason said. "So we'll wait and see how they respond to our proposal."
Stange acknowledged that many students move off campus, especially as upperclassmen. However, on-campus residents are more likely to receive peer support that generally leads to higher GPAs and a greater likelihood of degree completion at the school, Stange said, particularly during a student's first year.
"So we feel that having students on campus is a strategic advantage to help them gain the support system in place for when they're struggling and to gain the life skills they need . for when they live off campus," Stange said.
Stange said the proposed dormitory would house 700 or more students, and like the Petersen Residence Hall, would be targeted to first- and second-year undergraduates. Although plans still need to be approved, Stange said he would like to see the project move forward soon.
"And if we can start that in 2015, that would be great."
Lehnertz said his department will formally request permission to move ahead with planning at the Sept. 10 Board of Regents meeting in Ames.
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Information from: Iowa City Press-Citizen, http://www.press-citizen.com/
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