On the mornings when Spencer Smith and Aaron Czyzewski don’t have early classes, they’re jolted from bed by the sound of grinding metal and falling concrete.
“It sometimes shakes the building,” Czyzewski said.
The two freshmen are residents of Bean’s Wilcox hall, and their second story room is about as close as a Bean resident can be to the demolition of the old Williams’ Bakery building, the site where the new arena is set to be built.
But what’s more bothersome to some than the sound of dump trucks is the sound of what’s not being built – new residence halls.
“It’s still something that I am deeply concerned about,” said Keith Bassett, former president of the Residence Hall Association.
University Housing has overbooked the residence halls by roughly 1,400 students for next school year following a flood of applicants before the priority deadline.
Administrators have said the University’s decision to build the arena does not affect its ability to implement the Strategic Housing Plan, which will systematically renovate and replace the current residence halls.
Noisy construction isn’t unusual for a growing campus, though, especially one that has invested roughly half a billion dollars on construction projects over the last decade.
“I had no idea there would be construction right out our window,” Smith said, adding that he and his roommate like the idea of having a new arena. “If we got free tickets that’d be nice.”
Demolition began on the bakery site about two weeks ago, and demolition crews nearly have the site all cleared out. The University is expected to break ground on the project following the Olympic Trials in June and expects the arena to be open by the start of the 2010-11 basketball season.
The University’s residence halls have been ranked second in the nation for having the worst “dorms like dungeons” in the Princeton Review, a fact students often cite when arguing that the University desperately needs to build new residence halls.
The Oregon University System limits how much debt the University is able to take on to 7 percent of its annual budget. The $200 million bonds that were approved by the state legislature inches the University closer to that limit, although it still allows enough room for it to acquire roughly $60 million more to finance the construction of new residence halls. Phase one of the strategic housing plan could begin as early as 2010, said Frances Dyke, vice president for finance and administration.
Between 2010 and 2017 the University’s debt capacity, or the amount it could still borrow, could fall to as low as $27 million, Dyke wrote in an e-mail to the Emerald. Dyke’s analysis was based on a debt capacity worksheet she completed earlier this year.
That number would only occur if the University started several other projects during that seven-year period, which is something Dyke said “is unlikely.”
“By 2017, substantial amounts of debt capacity are freed for housing and other projects,” she wrote. “My goal in the debt capacity study was to include all known or anticipated projects at the earliest time they might be started. This provided a conservative approach to calculating capacity, but is not necessarily the time frame that will be realized since many factors will enter into the decision to undertake a particular project.”
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