Residence Halls & apartments

[classof2014]

Perhaps they decided to renovate the zig-zag dorms instead???

Renovating Scheele, Lank, Alumni, and Brandt would then save about $40 million. Which is quite substantial.

[vu72]

Interesting to compare the announcement of sorority housing and Scheele renovation to the master plan's original vision... 

For one, the master plan says that the difference between a major renovation of a residence hall and constructing one is not too different (for them, $10M), so it suggests just building new. But I guess there isn't enough money to make that happen, at least with Scheele, as the plan is to renovate it (unless the remodel is a very temporary fix to get another couple years out of the building). Does anybody know the extent of the renovations?

Do you know which STEEM building they are planning (or re-planning)? The m. plan has three buildings going up in three phases. It seems to indicate a replacement for education will be the first, followed by a physics, chem, bio building (more than twice as expensive), followed by the third.


Master plan link: goo.gl/xLpK50
pp. 48, 94, 212-215

Just looked at the plan and it does have Greek housing going in where it is proposed.  It also calls for a "residence hall reconstruction" noted next to Scheele.  The shape, as illustrated, is much different then what is there now, so the term "reconstruction" may include demolition and constructing a new dorm on the site, who knows.

[crusader05]

I think it might also be less about the cost and more about the timeline.  You would have to tear scheele down and start over which could put all of those beds off line for probably closer to 2 years.  If you renovate you could limit that to one year.  The biggest crunch the university seems to be in now is space. They need most of the beds they have available so they either need to build a new dorm (like beacon)or find a way to move people around to free up a dorm to renovate. The sorority housing offers an opportunity to empty a current dorm without losing revenue(and probably increasing it as I'm sure living in the houses will cost more) and still giving time to fix it up for the next year.

[vu72]

I think it might also be less about the cost and more about the timeline.  You would have to tear scheele down and start over which could put all of those beds off line for probably closer to 2 years.  If you renovate you could limit that to one year.  The biggest crunch the university seems to be in now is space. They need most of the beds they have available so they either need to build a new dorm (like beacon)or find a way to move people around to free up a dorm to renovate. The sorority housing offers an opportunity to empty a current dorm without losing revenue(and probably increasing it as I'm sure living in the houses will cost more) and still giving time to fix it up for the next year.

So the new plan for the sorority houses says each unit will have 25 beds.  There are six units so that's 150 beds.  Does Sheele have more than 150 beds?

[Donjon VU07]

I think it might also be less about the cost and more about the timeline.  You would have to tear scheele down and start over which could put all of those beds off line for probably closer to 2 years.  If you renovate you could limit that to one year.  The biggest crunch the university seems to be in now is space. They need most of the beds they have available so they either need to build a new dorm (like beacon)or find a way to move people around to free up a dorm to renovate. The sorority housing offers an opportunity to empty a current dorm without losing revenue(and probably increasing it as I'm sure living in the houses will cost more) and still giving time to fix it up for the next year.

So the new plan for the sorority houses says each unit will have 25 beds.  There are six units so that's 150 beds.  Does Sheele have more than 150 beds?

The rooms in Lank were numbered from 01 to about 40.  And Scheele and Lank have near-identical layouts.
I'm not sure if I can assume this, but if all 40 rooms on each floor in Lank (2-5, since the layout of the 1st floor is different) are dorm rooms, we're talking about 320 beds.  So if that's also true for Scheele, then 320 people (+ first-floor residents) would fit in Scheele.

Maybe those "25" beds each sleep two?

[Vale O. Paradise]

In the plan (written in 2009), it says "It is possible, with the current bed supply, to temporarily vacate an entire hall and still provide enough beds to meet the current demand. This would allow single halls to be demolished and rebuilt in place." While the enrollment is higher not than in 2009, 1) Beacon Hall certainly provides more capacity and 2) Much of the growth is from non-freshman (don't live on campus). They should still have the space needed to tear down and build up. The Tribune article on the new sorority housing states that renovations will begin in spring 2016 and reopen in the fall. That seems fast: maybe it is just a patchwork fix until it can be torn down and something new can be built. While saving $10 million on each building if VU were to remodel existing structures is considerable, so too are the costs of trying to "sell" those buildings to prospective students. Scheele was built in 1961. If they build a new one and it lasts another 60 years, they might recoup that $10 million over the course of the building's life simply through added value to the campus aesthetics. The current residence halls are certainly not helping attract students. I remember touring prospective students and their parents and walking briskly past them in order to get to better parts of campus. While they don't need to have lazy rivers or climbing walls, residence halls should be much more inviting than the ones in place now.

[classof2014]

The one gripe I have about the university is the lack of history on campus. A majority of campus in post 1960s. The oldest buildings, mainly the freshmen dorms built throughout the 60s aren't in the best of shape, instead of fixing them up the university opts to rebuild. Very few buildings on campus, other than the Chapel and Hilltop, hold a historical significance on campus. The university dates back to 1859 yet there isn't a building remaining that predates 1900. I understand Valpo has a history of burning but I also know many historical buildings were simply raised when they were allowed to fall into a state of disrepair.

Don't get me wrong new state of the art buildings are great but so is the stoic historical buildings that oozes history.

[crusader05]

While it is true that all the women living in Scheele won't transfer into the houses it will still alleviate any future housing crunches. They may currently have enough room to move everyone around. But, we do not know what the incoming freshman class will be and if they are closer to the class of two years ago, where the university had to use overfill strategies, you could very quickly run into a space issue before an old dorm could be razed and a new dorm could be built. 

[Vale O. Paradise]

A few years ago, a VU professor wrote a great article about the history of campus. There is a pretty clear line that can be drawn to separate the aesthetics/campus plan of the pre-Lutheran era, which cuts out nearly half of the university's 150+ years. In the decades that followed the Lutheran purchase, the campus got hit by a surge of new students coupled with a lack of cohesive planning. There were plans to create a more traditional, gothic look, but that never transpired. Instead, we got a bunch of less-than-memorable buildings. They might be old, but unfortunately at this point we can't exactly imbue them with a sense of grandness or timelessness (as much as I'd like to) if it wasn't there to begin with. This quote from the story sums up what happened:


"By the later 1960s, it was apparent that the university had charged ahead with building without following Labatut's advice. In a 1965 letter to O. P., he registered his disappointment about recent campus additions, particularly regarding the placement of new buildings. He noted "so much wasted space for so few buildings.... buildings designed as if unsympathetic to each other, or designed by different architects at different times and without consideration for the quality of space between them," and he questioned the orientation of new buildings (18 October 1965, Labatut Papers). Labatut advocated "better land use, higher density of buildings, more order and greater economy of land, better landscape treatment and consequently more beauty" (Ibid). At Valparaiso, as was the case with many postwar campuses, the rapid speed of building had left insufficient time for careful planning."

Hopefully, now armed with a plan that takes the campus as a whole into consideration, we'll plant the seeds for a richer sense of visual history in a few decades.

Full story here: goo.gl/HJdRRt

[bbtds]

The University Promenade development has been under investigation by the FBI for the past 2 years.


http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/fbi-pays-another-visit-to-porter-county-government/article_66fa64ee-1c18-52e6-9688-524c4d6bc939.html#utm_source=nwitimes&utm_campaign=/email-newsletters/dailyheadlines/&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headline

Federal agents have been visiting various Porter County government offices for nearly two years, looking at a variety of areas of operations.

The investigations have also targeted the University Promenade development in Valparaiso and various records in the city of Portage, including campaign fund expenditures of Portage Mayor James Snyder.

There have been no indictments as of yet stemming from the investigations.

[agibson]

The University Promenade development has been under investigation by the FBI for the past 2 years.

Maybe the Promenade's only been involved for about a year?  This might be the article that broke that piece of the story
http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/valparaiso/valpo-s-promenade-development-targeted-by-fbi/article_df9ec764-aebf-53ed-89f7-818511c47941.html

Porter County offices generally have been involved (they hold the country records) with  an investigation for two years.  The mayor of Portage seems to be one target.

I don't know how much, if anything, we know about where the Promenade fits into all of this.