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PROVO, Utah (AP) -- Brigham Young University has announced that rental units outside most of north Provo will lose the university's housing approval in four years.
The move, which takes effect on April 30, 2007, comes more than a year after the university stopped approving student housing outside Provo.
It affects 40 rental properties -- 36 small units and four larger complexes -- including Parkway Crossing, College Terrace Apartments and Lakeridge Condominiums, all in Orem. Several hundred BYU students live in the affected properties.
BYU off-campus housing manager Garry Briggs said in a letter to property owners Tuesday that a review, the university has established new boundaries, and that with "very limited exceptions" properties outside the new boundaries would not be approved.
A BYU spokeswoman said exceptions would be for individual students.
City Council Vice Chairman Dave Knecht said the university's boundaries will affect neighborhoods, students and investors.
"It's not a simple or small thing," Knecht said. "No matter where you are in the picture, there's some impact -- good or bad. ... It has huge implications."
After 2007, the approximate BYU-approved housing boundaries will run along 2200 North and 2230 North from Carterville Road to N. Temple Drive on the north and along Center Street from Seven Peaks Boulevard to 500 West on the south. The east and west boundaries are 1450 East and 500 West.
More than 90 percent of the university's approved housing falls within the new boundaries and there will be enough units for the university's students, said Carri Jenkins, BYU spokeswoman.
The number of rentals approved by the university's Off-Campus Housing Office has risen steadily for the past five years. In 2003, more than 23,000 were approved. In the past winter semester, 14,738 of those units were occupied by BYU students.
As boundaries where approved housing existed extended farther and farther, it was taking more time and resources to keep track of the rental properties, she said.
"Boundaries had to be set," Jenkins said. "We want to be able to effectively do the job."
The university's new boundaries took Rand and Evelyn Johnson, who rent out two units in Lakeridge they bought in 2000 and 2001, completely by surprise.
"We wouldn't have bought there if we had known they would have changed it on us," Evelyn Johnson said.
(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
