City officials are in the early stages of plans to replace some of the MSU family housing facilities.
Looking forward to the next phase of student family housing, officials are deciding between three new locations on the Harrison corridor, including the Cherry Lane and Faculty Bricks site, the old Michigan State Police post and the current location of Spartan Village.
The potential locations were discussed at the East Lansing City Council meeting Tuesday evening.
The process of taking down the Spartan Village apartments built in 1957 has finally begun and the last of the apartments will be removed beginning in 2017.
Though the family apartments Cherry Lane and Faculty Bricks have already been removed, which reduced the number of units by 562, Spartan Village apartments are still slowly being taken away, Vice President for Auxiliary Enterprises at Residential and Hospitality Services Vennie Gore said. 300 Spartan Village units have been removed, leaving 1,162 units currently available for students to reside.
The family housing units were first built for veterans that came to MSU after WWII. The demand that was present in those days is no longer, which is what has allowed for the immense cutbacks.
One of the biggest factors in building the new on-campus family housing is affordability. The development will focus mainly on accommodating graduate students with families, specifically international students.
“What’s critical for us is that our graduate students, especially our international students, have affordable housing,” Gore said. “Given what the graduate stipend is, living off campus puts a pretty big strain on the ability to afford housing so we want to make sure that we do that.”
Because of the reasons listed above, off-campus housing was not an option.
“We actually did contemplate the idea of possibly doing this off campus but it is absolutely unaffordable because you can’t get MSHDA money for anything that is student housing,” MSU Community Relations Director Ginny Haas said.
Having family housing available, mainly for international graduate students, has actually brought students to MSU, Haas said. We currently have roughly 250 families and 75 children, ranging from infants to high school students.
“Many of the families who are coming are looking for cross cultural experiences with their kids, and a sense of safety that comes along with that,” Gore said. “They’ve told us having that community is vital.”
