New housing development right move

June 23, 2008 —

A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION -

With the news that SVSU will break ground on Living Center Southwest, members of the campus community can expect not only to get a little more leg room, but also an improvement in the overall quality of life at SVSU.

The stretch of Pierce Road on which SVSU sits in an odd one. If you're coming from Bay Road, look to your right and you see a deep Michigan ditch, trees twisting around one another, and a vast field that grows God knows what. Look to your left and you see a seemingly endless lot of modern looking townhouses, labeled University Village, and if you've passed by in the last two years, you've undoubtably seen new sets of those townhouses being constructed.

Knowing you're passing a university, the obvious next question would be "Where are all the dorms?" It's no secret that SVSU has focused heavily on the construction and expansion of its University Village and Pine Grove Apartment complexes since the last brick was laid on Living Center South in 2005. While those townhouses do bring a unique look and feel to our campus community, much of traditional university life resides in the dormitory. This is why the construction of the new $12 million dorm facility - aptly named Living Center Southwest - caught our eye. Its completion in August 2009 will bring a home to 210 more students, and with them, a stronger, more vibrant campus community will follow.

While the University Village and Pine Grove have helped increase campus residency four times in the past 10 years, they provide a different kind of living. The units are apartments, separating their tenants and while those tenants have done well to create a community within their respective complexes, any sense of boundary found in those complexes is, as any person who has lived in both can tell you, almost completely gone living in a dorm. There is a sense of community akin to dorm life that does not exist anywhere else, and that sense is a necessity to any university, especially one looking to take the next step in terms of growth.

The central location the new LCSW will provide for students will no doubt stimulate activity across campus. Having a place where a mass of students live, share space, and get to know each other should provide the needed force to jump start programming and activity something this campus has been begging for for the better part of a decade.

This move will not only stimulate campus life, it comes with a nice price tag. When you compare it to the $17 million additions to University Center and Pine Grove which brought 310 more beds in 2006, and the $30 million project at CMU to build Woldt Tower, which brought 456 new beds to that campus, the $12 million looks like a comparable addition.

This is the right move for our University to hoist itself onto the same plateau as Grand Valley and Central Michigan. Dorm life is a staple of the college experience. It breeds the community atmosphere that makes for a successful and active campus. And for us at Saginaw Valley, it's been a long time coming.