The University of Rhode Island announced its plan to build two new dorm buildings by 2027 on Dec. 4, an accelerated timeline to what was proposed in the Housing and Residential Life Master Plan last fall.
The university estimated the dorms would produce over 1,100 news beds on campus, through a public-private partnership with the Gilbane development company, according to an article in Rhody Today . The announcement is the first step in carrying out the 2023 master plan, which initially estimated 900 beds from the public private partnership. These dorms are expected to replace existing distressed housing in the Roger Williams Complex, of which many buildings are slated for demolition.
The two newly-announced dorms will be apartment style and not expand any of the current campus footprint, however they will be constructed atop current student and faculty parking, according to Ryan Carrillo, the director of planning and real estate development at the university.
The first dorm is expected to hold 400 beds in an apartment-style design, according to Carrillo.
“It will be directly east of the 210 Flagg Road building,” Carrillo said. “So, there’s an existing faculty, staff and visitor parking lot there.”
The second site will be a 500-bed graduate residence hall, north of the new undergraduate building on Flagg Road, according to Carrillo. That site is also currently campus parking, made up of residential spots.
“We’re just getting to the point of working with the developer that we can understand the number of parking spaces that will be impacted,” Carrillo said.
The campus will not be seeing a drastic increase in capacity, due to the demolition of the Roger Williams Complex by 2039. This would remove 1,543 beds from campus, bringing the total of new assignable beds to 703, the master plan estimated.
These new dorms will be constructed in lieu of renovating already existing dorms on campus. Of the 24 undergraduate residence halls on campus, 11 were considered distressed by the HRL master plan. Nine of these distressed dorms were marked for demolition in the plan, including Dorr, Hopkins, Ellery, Coddington, Burnside and Aldrich Hall from the Roger Williams Complex, as well as Hutchinson, Peck and Tucker Hall.
The demolition is estimated to save the university an estimated total of $63 million in deferred maintenance projects, which the school found by weighing the cost of renovation. The marked dorms were also some of the highest ranked on HRL’s least desired housing survey, with the Roger Williams Complex sweeping the top spots.
While new dorms will cause changes on campus, South Kingstown town leaders are paying attention to how these changes may affect communities beyond URI.
“It’s nice that they’re, you know, taking it seriously that they want to build more housing on campus,” Josh Port, the vice chair of the South Kingstown Affordable Housing Collaborative Committee, said in a commission meeting on Dec. 4 . “They’re building something, but the scope of the problem is so much bigger than that.”
Port was optimistic about URI’s announcement, however he described the target number of 703 new beds as “better than nothing.”
The committee’s specific concerns were the amount of URI students taking up rental spaces in town, a problem that has also been felt in Narragansett, Rhode Island. One thing that brought Port hope was that admission numbers have held stagnant over the past five years, at roughly 17,000 students.
Port interpreted these factors as a possible sign that, instead of building more beds for new students, the university is attempting to accommodate their high number of off campus students.
The university houses roughly 35% of its student body on campus, according to the HRL master plan. This percentage is much lower compared to the University of Connecticut, at 64%, and the University of Vermont, at 57%, according to U.S. News and World Report . Both schools were compared to URI in the master plan.
“Is this a reflection of the fact that they realize they have a bigger problem?” Port said. “Maybe they are actually trying to up the net number of new beds and so that, at the very least, it seems like they’re doing better than we thought. So I think that’s a good thing.”
Construction is expected to begin on the two new dorms in the fall of 2025, according to the article in Rhody Today.