By
Emily Severson
Arizona Daily Wildcat
UA is relying on recommendations of a team of students and faculty for first time
Two new family and graduate housing facilities are in the beginning stages of being built by the UA in hopes of completion by summer 2002.
The facilities are being built to replace the Christopher City Apartments. They will be smaller, but they should have the same number of apartments, said James Van Arsdale, director of Residence Life.
One facility will be built primarily for graduate housing on North Tyndall Avenue just north of Coronado Residence Hall. The second facility will be built to meet the needs of student families, but the location has not been determined yet.
The University of Arizona is now preparing a qualifications request for a developer. Once this is completed, a place for the second facility will eventually be determined. The Christopher City lot is being considered, Van Arsdale said.
"We are hoping the developers might be able to come up with a better site. There are some problems with the Christopher City location," Van Arsdale said. "The main one being that it makes it harder for students to get back to campus at night."
The next step will determine the builder once the requests are received.
The UA is trying a different process for this project. UA President Peter Likins appointed a transition team that is made up of faculty, staff and students to advise him of the best possible plan for the facilities.
"It is a new way of doing business for the UA," said George McClellan, chair of the committee and a graduate student in higher education. "Students make up the biggest constituency in the committee, and we have been involved since minute one."
Affordability, sense of community and safety for children are the main requests the transition team has made, McClellan said.
The team is made up of about 26 faculty, staff and student members who started meeting on a weekly basis since the first week of school.
"Hopefully, the outcome of the project will reflect the ideas of the team," McClellan said. "The students have been incredibly active, creative and thoughtful as members."
The committee will present their requests to Likins and Saundra Taylor, vice president of Campus Life, once they have been organized.
"I think it is important to keep pressure on the university to build a facility that graduate student families want," said Max Benson, a former Christopher City resident and geography junior.
Some of the graduate and family housing students have voiced a concern about the new facility because of private involvement and the necessity to have all the apartments occupied. The students said that it is a possibility the university will let undergraduate students or Tucson residents live at the facility, and this could damage the community feeling that was so important to them at Christopher City.
"I think if outside people moved in, it would be very detrimental to community," Benson said. "We feel that non-students have different concerns than students have."
The initial revenues would go to the builder, who should be known in January, said Joel Valdez, senior vice president of Business Affairs at the UA.
"It is a rational fear because the quality of the community could be affected by who is allowed to live there," Van Arsdale said. "If there is one message the Chris City residents have had, it is that they appreciated the quality of the community at Chris City and are concerned with it anywhere else."
"The other side that everyone must realize is that this is a self-supporting venue, the perfect solutions would be if we could have 150 families to fill 150 units every year," Van Arsdale said. "However, the likelihood of that is close to zero."
Another possibility is that there would be more families than units available.
"If this happens, we would have to develop some sort of priority system," he added.
The third possibility is that there will be vacancies.
"We cannot sit by and allow vacancies to eat us alive financially. We would have to develop a marketing scheme to get other students to live there," Van Arsdale said.
