UNH backs off on Westville dorm plan

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UNH backs off on Westville dorm plan

By Mary E. O'Leary

Register Topics Editor

NEW HAVEN - Following more candid conversations with neighbors, the University of New Haven has decided not to pursue approval for a temporary dormitory residence in an apartment building in Westville.

Thea Buxbaum, interim executive director of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance, Monday said the reaction from neighbors was overwhelmingly against such a plan.

Going forward, however, Buxbaum said she is interested in getting UNH students more involved in the section, just not in a dormitory situation.

A meeting was held last week by UNH President Steven Kaplan at his office on the West Haven campus.

"They were lovely to deal with," Buxbaum said of UNH officials, as well as the representatives of Metropolitan Developers who built Wintergreen of Westville, a 293-unit apartment complex in five buildings, which has been on the rental market for the last year.

Neighbors have had a rocky relationship with Metropolitan since it proposed the large development several years ago and as part of final approval for the project, any use of it for student housing required new approvals by the Board of Aldermen.

Even if everyone was on board with placing some 200 UNH undergraduate students in a building with 60 apartments, there would not have been enough time to get through the approval process to allow UNH to finalize its housing plans for next year.

"The time-line wasn't going to allow them to succeed," Buxbaum said.

George Synodi, vice president for finance and treasurer at UNH, said it was getting late to continue delaying decisions on housing options for fall.

He said UNH will probably rent some 25 additional beds at Forest Hills and 40 beds at the Regency, two apartment buildings in West Haven where UNH students already live and where the university assigns residential advisers to monitor behavior.

Buxbaum said 110 of 293 units at Wintergreen have been leased, with 25 percent to 30 percent of them students. UNH officials said they will tell returning students that Wintergreen is a private housing option, if they are interested.

UNH would have preferred a situation where it managed students in the building, but Buxbaum said rentals to individuals will likely yield fewer students per building.

Buxbaum said an open dialogue will continue with the developers and the tenants who now occupy about onethird of the large site are already benefiting local businesses.

Buxbaum said the group also kicked around the idea of talking with representatives of all the area colleges to work on a student code of conduct for students living off campus to lessen disruption that often occurs in residential neighborhoods.

Adherence to such a code would give colleges more leverage in controlling behavior, she said.

Synodi said UNH is still considering some kind of future arrangement in which UNH graduate students would lease at Wintergreen. As for the shortage of undergraduates beds for 2008-09, Synodi said the school would know better by May 1.

"It's a nice problem to have. I worry the year we don't have this problem," Synodi said of the jump in enrollments.

Mary E. O'Leary can be reached at 789-5731 or moleary@nhregister. com. UNH