Northeastern announces plans for new residence hall

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The proposed 20-story building will provide some 800 undergraduate beds in apartment-style units. The multi-use project involves partnering with a private developer and represents an innovative approach to housing more students in university-supervised buildings. (Rendering developed by Cube 3 Architects and Elkus Manfredi Architects)

Greg St. Martin
News@Northeastern

BOSTON–North­eastern Uni­ver­sity is moving ahead with its plans for a stu­dent res­i­dence hall on Burke Street that will pro­vide some 800 beds for under­grad­u­ates, a multi-​​use project that involves part­nering with a pri­vate devel­oper and rep­re­sents an inno­v­a­tive approach to housing more stu­dents in university-​​supervised buildings.

The plans call for a building with apartment-​​style suites for under­grad­u­ates that will reach 20 sto­ries and 230 feet at its highest point, with lower wings at the street edges of the site. North­eastern is part­nering with Amer­ican Campus

The proposed 20-story building will provide some 800 undergraduate beds in apartment-style units. The multi-use project involves partnering with a private developer and represents an innovative approach to housing more students in university-supervised buildings. (Rendering developed by Cube 3 Architects and Elkus Manfredi Architects)
The proposed 20-story building will provide some 800 undergraduate beds in apartment-style units. The multi-use project involves partnering with a private developer and represents an innovative approach to housing more students in university-supervised buildings. (Rendering developed by Cube 3 Architects and Elkus Manfredi Architects)

Com­mu­ni­ties, a Texas-​​based devel­oper that spe­cial­izes in building student-​​housing com­mu­ni­ties. ACC will lease the university-​​owned Burke Street parking lot, where it will con­struct and manage the building, which will fea­ture a range of stu­dent ser­vices and ameni­ties as well as ground-​​floor com­mer­cial space.

North­eastern pre­sented the project to Boston res­i­dents at a com­mu­nity meeting on Dec. 15, and a letter of intent was filed to the Boston Rede­vel­op­ment Authority on Dec. 23.

Kathy Spiegelman, vice pres­i­dent and chief of campus plan­ning and devel­op­ment at North­eastern, said the res­i­dence hall will mirror Northeastern’s other res­i­dence halls and build­ings in many impor­tant ways. Stu­dents will be held to the same code of con­duct in place in other sim­ilar campus housing spaces, and res­i­dent assis­tants will live on site.

Because the building will be pri­vately oper­ated, the units will not be part of the housing lot­tery system. Instead, stu­dents will lease the units from the devel­oper. Spiegelman said it’s expected that leases will be com­pet­i­tive with other apartment-​​style suites on campus, and ACC will work with stu­dents to accom­mo­date stu­dents’ sched­ules while they are on co-​​op.

The next step is for North­eastern to submit an Insti­tu­tional Master Plan noti­fi­ca­tion form, a require­ment as part of the city’s review of the project when amend­ments are made to the university’s orig­inal IMP. The pro­posed building is larger and will house more under­grad­uate stu­dents than what was out­lined in the 2013 IMP.

The project addresses both Northeastern’s com­mit­ment and the city of Boston’s desire to bring more stu­dents into campus housing. With the opening of East Vil­lage last year, North­eastern now pro­vides more than 9,100 stu­dent beds and has more than dou­bled its number of beds since 1998, when it pro­vided a total of 3,663 beds. Since then, North­eastern has opened West Vil­lage, Inter­na­tional Vil­lage, Dav­en­port Com­mons, and other housing that has increased that number by more than 4,800 beds.

Mean­while, Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s Boston 2030 plan out­lines a goal of cre­ating 18,500 new under­grad­uate stu­dent beds, which would reduce the number of stu­dents living off-​​campus in Boston by 50 percent.

Northeastern’s part­ner­ship with ACC—which has devel­oped sim­ilar projects else­where across the country but not yet in Boston—reflects an inno­v­a­tive approach in the city to achieving this shared goal through pri­vately run housing for col­lege students.

The pro­posed Burke Street res­i­dence hall is the latest in the university’s series of invest­ments and rede­vel­op­ment projects that North­eastern has launched along and around Columbus Avenue. North­eastern will open the Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Sci­ence and Engi­neering Com­plex later this year, and last year it announced a unique public-​​private part­ner­ship to build a state-​​of-​​the-​​art ath­letic com­plex that will trans­form William E. Carter play­ground and expand recre­ation oppor­tu­ni­ties for both city res­i­dents and North­eastern students.

In 2009, North­eastern also opened Inter­na­tional Vil­lage, a 1,200-bed res­i­dence hall near the inter­sec­tion of Tremont Street and Melnea Cass Boule­vard. And in fall 2014, the uni­ver­sity helped secure a $20 mil­lion fed­eral grant to make sig­nif­i­cant infra­struc­ture improve­ments to the MBTA’s Rug­gles Station.

(This article is reproduced here with permission from News@Northeastern.)

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