UW wants more living room for students

University of Washington students might soon bid good riddance to the small, dark dorm rooms of freshman-loathed Mercer Hall.

Future UW students could be living in one of five new housing complexes by 2013. The complexes will be part of a plan that will provide additional living space for more than 3,000 UW students.

But the new digs will cost students more -- their rent will finance the $850 million housing project.

The project is outlined in a proposal that will go before the UW's Board of Regents on Thursday. Right now, the university houses about 5,100 students in rooms and apartments designed to accommodate no more than about 4,500, according to the proposal.

The university has planned to increase student housing for years, a goal that came to the forefront in 2006 when an unprecedented number of freshmen were forced to crowd by threes into 12-by-14-foot rooms. Lodgings were in such short supply that some students even found themselves living in converted lounges.

Most of the housing construction will happen in the off-campus neighborhood directly west of the university. A cluster of six-story residence halls and apartments would go up just west of Schmitz Hall on Northeast Campus Parkway.

A later phase of the plan also calls for the renovation of six of the UW's seven dorms -- the seventh being Mercer Hall, which will be torn down in 2011.

"Dark is one way to describe it," said Mercer resident Courtney Ioane, a sophomore. "I know that bothers a lot of people -- lots of people try to transfer out."

She likes the seclusion of the hall -- near the University Bridge and Northeast Pacific Street.

But most students don't, said Rob Lubin, assistant director of facilities operations at the UW.

"Of our large concrete residence buildings, Mercer is actually the newest one -- it was built in 1970," Lubin said "But it has been typically the least popular building for our residences."

A third phase to the proposal calls for the creation of 1,500 additional beds starting in 2013, but UW housing officials don't yet know where those buildings will be constructed.

The three-phase, $850 million project is supposed to be completed in 2020. Debt, not private contributions, will pay for it. So will students.

The new dorms will cost more to live in than the renovated ones.

The cost of living in a renovated room would increase 20 percent the year the residence reopened. And UW officials want to increase the cost of new and renovated lodging 2 percent every year during the building project.

The current cost for a two-bedroom is $4,100, according to the proposal.

The UW's Housing and Food Services Department is a self-sustaining program that doesn't typically receive state funding or private gifts, Lubin said. "We're able to fund this through more of a business model, so that's what we're doing," he said.

The report on the building proposal points out that over the last eight years, the UW has increased rates for double-residence dorm rooms at a more modest pace than other Pac-10 institutions, including the University of Oregon, Washington State University and the University of California-Berkeley.

The new plan would rid dorms of "triple" rooms and communal bathrooms. There could be room for career-counseling services -- even an auditorium, housing officials said.

A sketch of a renovated two-bed dorm room shows an oblong 12-foot by 24.5-foot room, more than a third of which is taken up by a somewhat spacious bathroom.

Former Mercer resident Emily Cane, a UW sophomore, said Tuesday that private bathrooms and the elimination of triple rooms would appeal to students -- but she's skeptical about the pricing. After spending last year in Mercer Hall, she decided it was cheaper for her to move to a nearby apartment that's not owned by the university.

"I feel if they increase (rent) that much, they would get more people moving out," she said.

Housing officials with the UW will tell regents Thursday that a survey indicated students value "living/learning communities" where they are close to others with similar interests. Building clusters of dorms and apartments in the west part of the University District could help create a tightknit student community near University Way, Lubin said.