A new housing tower for Cal State Long Beach students is planned near the long-shuttered Walmart building in the former City Place shopping center downtown, Mayor Robert Garcia announced Tuesday.

The 22-story complex, called the CSULB Downtown Village, will be able to house up to 1,100 students and faculty members, and will include 16 classrooms, 800 beds and a university art museum, officials said. The students will be mostly juniors, seniors and graduate students, and their presence will be a boon for downtown businesses, the mayor said.

Garcia and CSULB President Jane Close Conoley announced the project, located at Fourth Street and Long Beach Boulevard, Tuesday morning at the Beverly O’Neill Theater during a presentation on several in-progress developments that was co-hosted with the Long Beach Business Journal.

“I’m so grateful that Cal State Long Beach is as bullish as I am in the downtown,” the mayor said Tuesday.

Shooshani Developers, a West Hollywood company, owns the former City Place. Owner’s representative Tony Shooshani said of the new development plans Tuesday: “These students will live here and hopefully want to live here after they graduate.”

‘Town and gown’

Cal State Long Beach’s work with Shooshani’s company is progressing in parallel to the campus’s work with an Irvine developer to produce another large-scale project in downtown Long Beach. Developer Ratkovich Properties’ plans for its Broadway Block project to be built around the vacant Acres of Books site near the crossing of East Broadway and Long Beach Boulevard.

Ten to 20 percent of 375 planned residential units at the Broadway Block development will be set aside for Cal State Long Beach students and faculty, Ratkovich Properties President Cliff Ratkovich said in an email. The developer also plans to set aside some 3,000 square feet of commercial space for campus events and exhibits, and to donate other buildings to ArtExchange Long Beach.

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Broadway Block’s spaces for Cal State Long Beach people will be geared toward students and faculty involved in the campus’s fine arts programs. “They want to be there. They want to connected to the growing arts scene in Cal State Long Beach,” Conoley said during an interview at the theater.

The focus for Downtown Village is to be somewhat different. There, the plan calls for residential units to be set aside for graduate students and upperclassmen who are at least 21 years old.

“I think it’s a really big change for downtown, creating this town and gown relationship,” said Michael Bohn, senior principal and design director for Studio One Eleven, the Long Beach architecture firm that designed CSULB Downtown Village.

Conoley and Shooshani said development of Downtown Village will be a partnership between the public university campus and the private real estate company. Although Shooshani chose not to reveal projected development and construction costs, he said his company will pay for the necessary upfront investments.

The Long Beach campus, in turn, will provide Downtown Village with a steady stream of student tenants.

“It’s bigger than just renting out space. It’s about building community,” Shooshani said in an interview.

‘The Streets’

The Long Beach campus’s new downtown tower is scheduled to occupy the same place as the defunct Fresh & Easy market that has been vacant since the grocer vanished from California, Arizona and Nevada in the aftermath of the October 2015 announcement that its last 97 stores would go out of business.

Bohn, whose Studio One Eleven company is a tenant at the former City Place and working for Shooshani Developers to redesign and reposition the center, said no existing businesses will be displaced as a result of the Long Beach campus’s project.

Shooshani Developers revealed plans last fall to renovate and revitalize the center, and this spring, officials announced a rebranding of the shopping complex, which is now called The Streets.

The developer and Studio One Eleven intend to redesign the center, which consists of the area surrounded by Pine Avenue, Sixth Street, Long Beach Boulevard and Fourth Street, to accommodate restaurants and other businesses that mesh well with similar downtown enterprises. Previously, City Place had a more suburban aesthetic and focus on chain stores.

Studio One Eleven’s new offices are in the extensively renovated space that formerly housed a Nordstrom Rack store that closed in early 2014.

Walmart announced in January 2016 that it was closing its store at 151 E. Fifth St. for financial reasons. That space remains vacant, and no announcements concerning its future came out of Tuesday’s event.

The mayor discussed the overall development growth of downtown, saying about $2.5 billion worth of new construction is underway throughout all of Long Beach, including a massive new civic center complex.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to report the full name of Cal State Long Beach’s planned downtown development, to correct the percentage of planned residential units at Broadway Block that may be set aside for Cal State Long Beach students and faculty and to clarify that Mayor Robert Garcia’s remark that $2.5 billion worth of construction is in progress in Long Beach referred to the entire city, not just its downtown. The headline has also been updated to report the CSULB tower is planned to be built near the former Walmart site, not on those grounds.