Student Housing Business is the voice of the student housing industry.
Issue link: https://studenthousingbusiness.epubxp.com/i/564824
GRAND CAMPUS LIVING GRAND CAMPUS LIVING rocks student living climbing the charts into the top 5 largest 3rd party managers GCL BRINGS THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS, COMBINING A CUSTOMIZED BOUTIQUE MANAGEMENT APPROACH PARTNERED WITH THE NATIONALLY AWARDED LINCOLN PROPERTY COMPANY. VIE W FROM THE ACADEME JULY/AUGUST 2015 81 work with housing and with dining there, and we knew that the next place we were going to go, in terms of renovation, was going to be the North District. That's when we decided to look at that whole North District as a defned area, and fgure out how many beds we could keep, and what we could do in terms of where there was parking and where there were streets in that area. We wanted to fgure out how we could make that dis- trict more densely populated. Ultimately, the South District had about 6,600 beds and then the North District, when we're all fnished, will end up being about 6,200 beds, or something close to that. The River District, which is really just Lincoln and Morrill Tower, contains two 24-story buildings that have about 1,700 beds. We're not quite sure what we want to do with that. Those are two 1970s-era structures. There's a lot of divi- sion with these buildings — you either love them or you hate them. The board of trustees did not want us to do anything in that district, so we just decided that the North District made the most sense. SHB: How did you go about planning for the new housing? Calhoun: We decided that we needed a program for sec- ond year students to follow before we built the buildings in the initiative. We designed what we call the Second Year Transformational Experience Program (STEP) before we got into the actual building pro- gram. We've had the program in place as a pilot for the last two years. For the last two years, we had 1,000 spots for students who chose to live with us again, and then the second year we had 1,500 spots for the second-year transformational experience that students could opt in. The biggest part of the second-year program is engagement with the faculty. We conducted a study at Ohio State, and it's pretty con- sistent across the country, where we discovered that at least 50 percent of the students say that