Student Housing Business

JAN-FEB 2017

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VIE W FROM THE ACADEME January/February 2017 StudentHousingBusiness.com 34 System-wide Approach The University of Massachusetts takes a system-wide approach to development, including student housing projects. Interview by Randall Shearin F For more than 50 years, the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Building Authority has been in charge of developing and financ- ing projects in the five-campus system. Most recently, the Building Authority has created a public-private partnership to develop student housing on its Boston campus. SHB recently caught up with Patricia Filippone, executive director at the University of Massachusetts Building Authority (UMBA) to find out more about the entity, its work and upcoming projects. SHB: The University of Massachusetts handles its real estate development a bit differently than many other systems. Can you explain what the UMass Building Authority is and how it works within the system? Filippone: I am the executive director of the UMass Building Authority, which is a sepa- rate authority created by state legislation in 1960 to facilitate real estate transactions and capital construc- tion and develop- ment projects in the University of Massachusetts sys- tem. Historically, we have primar- ily only done s e l f - s u s t a i n i n g projects such as residence halls, dining facilities or parking garages. Now, our portfolio has expanded to include academic buildings, research facilities and actual infrastructure for each of the five campuses. SHB: The campuses are statewide, so you must cover quite a bit, geographically. Filippone: It does. We have five campuses — Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell and Worcester. Amherst is in the western part of the state; Dartmouth is on the southeast coast; Lowell is in the northern part of the state; and one in the city of Boston. We also have a medi- cal school in Worcester, so we really stand geographically across the state. SHB: That's quite an undertaking. How many projects do you have going right now? What are some of the high notes of those? Filippone: We have about 40 projects going on right now. We focus more on deferred maintenance and less on new buildings; if we can go in and renovate an existing build- ing, we'll do that. We're doing an expansion of the Isenberg School of Management on the Amherst campus — it's a $55 million build- ing, which consisted of significant fundrais- ing contributions. We just finished the Design Building project where we used special tim- ber wood and integrated different interdisci- plinary educational aspects of the schools of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning, Architecture and Building Construction into one building. On the Boston campus, we're currently working on about $400 million to $500 million worth of construction, which includes a $233 million utility corridor road relocation project. This project will relocate the utilities, now in the center of the campus, to a building on the outer loop of the campus. The new building will be able to support all of the needs of the campus. We're working on a 1,400-car parking garage on the Boston campus, and we just entered into a public- private partnership for 1,087-beds of student housing. Also, we just finished two brand new academic buildings on the Boston campus. University Hall, to name one, is an approxi- mately 200,000-square-foot academic building that is a combination of science labs, chemis- try and performing arts. SHB: The Building Authority just builds and renovates. What happens to the real estate once it's done? Do those projects get turned over to the campuses to be maintained and operated? The UMass Building Authority completed 1,500 new beds for the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst in recent years. PATRICIA FILIPPONE Executive Director, UMass Building Authority

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