Though it will take three years, Columbia will be gaining the room it desperately needs to house more students on its South Loop campus.

     Columbia recently finalized plans to build a huge student housing complex that will accommodate more than 700 students from Columbia along with another 1,000 students from Roosevelt and DePaul Universities.

     With Columbia's 5.5 percent increase in enrollment this fall, the new housing complex comes at a time when student dorms are sorely needed. The current waiting list for Columbia's two dorms has grown to 400 students.

     The new dorms will house 1,600 to 1,700 people, according to Bert Gall, executive vice president of Columbia. "The numbers aren't quite settled. It will probably take two weeks to have a definite number," he said.

     The $130 million housing complex, designed by Chicago architecture firm Antunovich Associates Inc., will be located on the southeast corner of the intersection of State Street and Congress Parkway, where a surface parking lot is now located.

     In addition to dorm rooms themselves, the complex will include 35,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor and a half-acre garden area on the roof.

     The housing will cost either $650 or $850 per month, depending if students choose to live in dorm-style rooms or opt for apartment style housing.

     Construction is scheduled to begin in early summer 2002, and will take roughly two years to complete. The facility should be ready to open for the 2004 school year.

     Despite Columbia's rapid growth rate, Gall said he isn't worried about the student body growing too quickly for the new dorms to house an ever-increasing student population.

     Columbia will have 40 percent of the beds in the dorms. DePaul will have 40 percent, and Roosevelt will have the remaining 20 percent, according to Gall. Those numbers could change. "If DePaul didn't need all their beds, Columbia would have access to them," he said.

     "If you add up the rooms, and the just under 10,000 students-maybe by then 10,500-we'll still be housing 10 percent of the population. If it skyrockets beyond [the projected student body size], we'll have to look at other options in the future," Gall said.

     "The dorms will increase the price of land and existing buildings-that's the downside," Gall added.

     "It's going to be hard [to expand in the future]; that's why fundraising is so important. As the South Loop becomes a more attractive destination, the more expensive property will be. It's one of those good news/bad news things."

     With rising property costs in the South Loop area, opportunities such as the new dorm may be few and far between, officials said. "We were fortunate in that it was city-owned land that we were able to receive for $1," said Terri Texley, deputy commissioner of the city's Planning Department, about the parcel of land where the new dorm will be built.

     Not all property in the South Loop is available at bargain prices, officials said. The former Blackstone Hotel, located next door to Columbia's Torco Building, is being converted to condos and is going for $500 to $600 per square foot-about $1 million per condo, a cost way beyond the limits of an educational institution.

     Some local officials think Columbia may be able to weather the rising property values.
"Fortunately Columbia bought a lot of property before the prices went up," said Barbara Lynne, executive director of the Near South Planning Board.

     Both Lynne and Texley said that despite the rising South Loop property values, there could still be the possibility of expansion for Columbia and other universities.

     Lynne said she doesn't think this will be the last project of its kind that Columbia will be able to undertake. "If the need for expansion is great enough, they will have to make it work," Lynne said.
Texley said that since property values have extended out of the reach for educational institutions, "they will just have to keep looking for opportunities like this one, which was city-owned and we were able to receive for $1."

     This new dorm project has been in the works for more than two years, having been delayed several times-the first time because of the CTA's plans to straighten the L-curve the el tracks make at Harrison Street and Wabash Avenue. The proposed route would have gone directly through the previously planned location of the dorms. The entire plan for the building had to be redesigned and downsized to make room for the CTA project.

     The project hit another stumbling block when Robert Morris College, one of the original participants, dropped out of the deal because meeting and academic space was eliminated from the building plans.

     Though the dorm will take years to complete, city officials believe it will do wonders for the South Loop's "educational corridor."

     "It will affect the South Loop in a couple of ways," Texley said. "One-it will strengthen the growth of the educational corridor that's there now. It has a commuter feel to it now; this will add some permanence. Second, it will improve the South Loop neighborhood in general. [The site is] a parking lot now, but this building was designed in context with the surroundings."

     She said that area residents will also benefit from having access to the building's retail facilities.
The new dorms are one of two new construction projects Columbia currently has in the works.

     Plans are also underway to build a $15 to $20 million Student Center at Wabash Ave. and 8th Street, on land anonymously donated to Columbia in May of 2000.


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