Detailed site plans should be submitted this month for a North College Park graduate housing complex that developers are marketing as an affordable housing alternative to both university graduate housing and luxury high-rise apartments like University View, company officials said.
The plans contain specific management details regarding issues such as parking and water drainage and should be submitted to the county sometime this month. The approval process will take about six months; if approved, the Greenville, S.C.-based developer, Collegiate Hall Properties, LLC, expects to start construction immediately.
“We’re ready now,” Collegiate Hall President Russ Davis said. Earliest estimates for completion are August 2007, Davis said.
The four-story, 600-unit Mazza Grandmarc Apartments will be located behind Jordan Kitt’s Music in North College Park and will be marketed specifically to graduate students. Initial plans for the project were presented to the city last February, but developers have been planning the project for four years.
Founded in 1997, Collegiate Hall has developed about 5,000 beds of student housing across the country. Though its apartments tend to be some of the more expensive in other markets, Collegiate Hall believes there’s opportunity in College Park to provide affordable housing “with a much, much, much higher degree of quality and management to graduate students,” Davis said.
“The university has done a good job filling its on-campus need, but there are still tens of thousands of students who live off campus and there’s not near that [amount of] housing,” he said.
The university and its graduate housing management corporation, Southern Management Corp., are considering a possible $100 increase to monthly rent for Graduate Hills and Graduate Gardens, drawing protests from graduate students on limited funds.
“It’s our goal keep our rents as low as possible,” Davis said. “We’re not going to try to compete with the high-rise guys. In order to pay our debts and serve our patrons, we don’t have to charge those kinds of rents.”
The latest monthly rent estimates for a bedroom in the Mazza Grandmarc Apartments is about $600, including all utilities, compared to $1,083 for a two-bedroom Graduate Hills apartment, if the proposed rent increase passes. Half of the new apartments will have one or two bedrooms, and remaining units will have four; each room will have a bathroom.
In addition, there will be a pool, computer lab, study area and exercise room. The building will have an elevator and a wrap-around parking garage for residents who have a swipe card. Collegiate Hall will provide housing for at least two police officers in exchange for their part-time patrol of the grounds. A shuttle service will be provided, and the site will be connected to local hiker/biker trails. The apartments will occupy eight of the 22-acre site and the rest “will be left green forever,” Davis said.
“It’s one thing to charge a lot of money, it’s another thing to get what you pay for,” he said.
The site plans of developer JPI for its Jefferson Square Apartments were not approved when submitted at the end of April; the county asked developers to address concerns in the plans and resubmit them in 120 days.
Davis hopes to avoid such setbacks. “We’re trying to be real careful to submit to the county that which is most likely to be approved,” Davis said. “We think we have addressed everyone comments and concerns … but you can’t be sure until you are in a public forum.”
