Ohio University's Housing and Residence Life's housing master plan includes two buildings and 600 additional beds located on South Green to align with enrollment targets and provide more engagement spaces for students.
The project will be carried out in three phases and cost $94.6 million. Housing and Residence Life will ask for an internal loan of $75 million, which the Board of Trustees will need to approve, and the rest will be taken from reserves.
For the first phase of the Housing Master Plan, OU will take halls offline and invest in major capital renovations, Jneanne Hacker, executive director for Housing and Residence Life, said.
The Housing Master Plan has been in the making since February 2022, with the first phase being approved by the Board of Trustees during its meeting in October 2022.
"We gave students the opportunity to identify elements of a new construction and the programs that they would like to see integrated into those spaces," Hacker said. "We had academic representation, as well as student representation (and) student leadership representation."
Student Senate President Megan Handle was one of the student leaders chosen to provide some input on these housing renovations.
"(Students at the meeting) got to go through with little dot stickers and put red on stuff we really didn't like, yellow on stuff we were okay with and green on stuff we liked," Handle said.
Handle hopes for the best, given how receptive the university appeared at the meeting. She also hopes the board creates housing that benefits students and places that students would like to live in, as it said it would do.
Along with working with the students, Hacker said, Housing and Residence Life also brought in a consultant from Ayers Saint Gross, a design firm, to evaluate the buildings on campus and identify which facilities need priority.
"They did a physical analysis of all of our existing buildings," Hacker said. "After they completed their work, the Housing Master Plan had several different priorities. First and foremost was to construct 600 new beds. That would be two new buildings strategically located on the Back South."
With the first phase allowing the university to take halls offline for capital improvements, the second phase involves taking four individual halls on Front South offline – one each year in the summer – for renovations.
"Phase two priorities would be to focus major capital renovations on the front four; so Pickering, Brown, Crawford, and McKinnon. Each one of those halls would be anticipated to come offline each year," Hacker said.
Hacker said that housing and residence life hopes to begin taking these halls offline in the Spring, if not Summer 2024.
After this, phase three is the next step in the Housing Master Plan. This phase includes demolishing the remaining five buildings on the back of South Green, the only mod-style buildings on campus.
"The third phase of the housing master plan really addresses the remainder of the mod-style facilities that exist on the back south," Hacker said. "The decision has been made to demolish the remainder of the five buildings that exist on back south."
The demolition is estimated to cost around $2 million per building, but Hacker said she anticipates some cost savings associated with this portion of the project.
“(The year) 2030 is when we anticipate that we will have the other remainder of the five back south facilities demolished," Hacker said.
In addition to the housing renovations, OU has also recently invested in several other campus buildings to enhance the university's academic offerings, research, and experiential learning opportunities, Shawna Wolfe, associate vice president of University Planning, said.
These projects include construction within the College of Fine Arts and a translational research facility within the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.
"I think that this new construction really gives us a great opportunity to not only build to meet the needs of our current students but also our future students." Hacker said.
