Housing plans turn to South Campus

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

As construction speeds along on South Lake Village, UB is turning its attention to the South Campus as the site for the next student residential-housing project, Dennis Black, vice president for student affairs, told the UB Council Tuesday.

The university plans to convert the traditional dormitory-style rooms in Goodyear Hall into two-bedroom apartments, as well as renovate Clement Hall, maintaining the building as a traditional, dormitory-style residence hall, Black said.

Design work will begin this year, with completion anticipated in 2003-04. The project would be funded with the revenue generated through the university's residence halls.

Once the South Campus project is under way, plans will turn back to the North Campus, Black said.

One site for potential development is the area between The Commons, the University Bookstore, the Student Union and the Ellicott Complex, dubbed by Black as "the Parcel B-Lee Loop" plan.

"Today, it's a large, open, green-space area lacking the connection between the important Ellicott Complex and the rest of the academic spine," he said. "We don't have a good pedestrian pathway there, we don't have a good vehicle pathway there; we don't have a connection between two significant portions of the campus."

One goal of the university's long-term housing plan is to develop this area as a "corridor between two important segments of the campus," not only with housing, but possibly with service and commercial spaces as well, Black said.

But such a plan would be complex to complete, involving "a variety of different constituencies and infrastructure issues," he acknowledged. A study to develop a master plan for the area will begin this year, with implementation expected "in phases in the years to come."

Another site for potential housing is the Flint entrance to the campus, near the old UB stadium. Called the Gateway project, it would be similar to the Hadley Village complex that opened in Fall 1999. Black estimated that Gateway would house between 400-500 students in predominately four-bedroom units.

The administration hopes to develop the Gateway project "perhaps as quickly as to have another opening of a housing project in the summer of 2001," he said.

Black told council members that the goals of UB's residential housing plan are to meet student housing needs on campus and aid in student recruitment and retention. "And, quite frankly, to improve student life," he said.

Black recapped for council members the university's recent housing-construction blitz. Flickinger Court, townhouses for 230 graduate and professional students located on Chestnut Ridge Road adjacent to campus, opened in August 1998. Hadley Village, the first housing built on campus in nearly 25 years, opened in August 1999 for juniors and seniors. South Lake Village, expected to open this August, will house 550 undergraduates, graduate and professional students in a mix of studio, one-, two- and four-bedroom units along the south shore of Lake LaSalle.

In response to a question from council member Mary Randolph, Black said that UB currently has housing for 6,200-6,300 students, "and we're looking at adding 'villages' of 400, 500, 600 students at a time."

Moreover, there is the potential at the Parcel B-Lee Loop site for housing for as many as 1,200 students, he said.

Discussions concerning how campus life would be impacted if UB had a much larger percent of the student population living on campus have focused on numbers as high as 10,000, Black added.

In other business Tuesday, the council heard a presentation on the "State of the Region" (SOR) project by John Sheffer, director of the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth, and Kathryn Foster, associate professor of planning, research director for the institute and co-director of SOR.

The project, released last November by the institute after a year-long, consultative process involving more than 200 leaders in Western New York and Southern Ontario, "has evolved into a major initiative and point of visibility for the university," Sheffer told council members. Although SOR is only one of more than a dozen projects of the institute, "it is by far number one in terms of time, energy and resources...we view it as pretty central to the institute's mission because we view it as pretty central to the vitality of the region."

All of the institute's work, Sheffer noted, is geared toward "cross-border, cross-sector collaboration, trying to encourage those and support those throughout the Buffalo-Niagara region."

The motivation for the SOR project, he said, is the "constant theme" institute members found running throughout meetings, conferences and workshops held in Western New York during the past few years. "And that is, things are so fuzzy" when it comes to measuring the state of the region, he said. Therefore, the theme of the SOR report is, "you cannot manage what you can't measure.

"We need to do a lot better job of measuring in this region if we expect to make progress: measuring where we are, measuring where we want to go, measuring how we're going to get there."

Sheffer and Foster told council members the report presents 98 baseline measures, or indicators, in 11 key subject areas: economy, education, environment, equity, government, health, human services, planning and land use, public safety, regional assets and technology and information. Each indicator also proposes goals and action steps for improving regional performance.

"We do believe that if we are able to pursue the action steps in this report and achieve the goals attached to these 98 indicators, that we would have a fundamentally improved region, a genuinely competitive region," Sheffer said.

He noted that the institute hosted a full-day conference Feb. 3 to begin to chart a course for the SOR follow-up efforts, and will continue to monitor performance, particularly for the 35-40 indicators for which new data is expected this year.