

Helen L. DeRoy Apartments at WSU.

There was a time when Wayne State University and the College for Creative Studies in Midtown were pretty much just commuter schools.

While that's still primarily their role, there's a growing demand for student housing, as MJ Galbraith writes at Model D:

Most of the students in this year's freshman class at Wayne State University were just five years old in 2002. While they were attending kindergarten, officials at Wayne State were making what seemed like a big gamble – opening the university's first modern residence hall. They would go on to open a second in 2003 and a third in 2005. 1,800 beds and approximately $100 million later, Wayne State was deeply invested in transforming itself from a commuter school into what it is today, a campus that functions 24 hours a day, seven days a week.



Today's freshman class might have to reckon with it for a minute – certainly the hundreds of those at the back of the waiting list for student housing – but Wayne State's transition was no sure bet. After the three residence halls were built, occupancy was well short of capacity and the idea of a waiting list for student housing seemed overly ambitious. But you can't just build a residence hall and expect it to fill up. To create a 24-hour campus, a university has to provide the amenities that students both want and need. It has to demonstrate that there is good reason to stick around campus.



"The residence halls struggled a bit in the beginning," says Wayne State's associate vice president for business and auxiliary operations and chief housing officer, Timothy Michael, who has been on staff since 2008. "It took some time to get students to think of Wayne as more than a commuter school. We had to build the fitness center and other amenities to make students think of us as more than what we were." . . .

This past December, Wayne State completed a 10-year housing facilities master plan that calls for a possible $230 million in development in the form of both new construction and renovations. Wayne State issued a request for proposals in January to build new residence halls with 800 beds' worth of furnished apartment-style housing. The two buildings will be built on Anthony Wayne Drive. The 15-story Deroy Apartments, built in 1972, will be demolished to make way for the new construction. The first new residence hall should provide 400 beds by the fall of 2018.

In 1987, CCS purchased the Art Centre Building on Kirby, but had challenges filling it up, Model D reports. CCS is currently renovating the Art Centre Building to increase its capacity by 100 beds.

Model D reports:

Just 120 of CCS's 760 students, or 15.7 percent of the student body, lived on campus in 1994. Today, however, 580 of its 1,460 students live on campus, or 39.7 percent of the student population. 280 students live in the Art Centre Building and 300 live in the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education. Like Wayne State, there is a waiting list to live in the residence halls.

"Once upon a time, we wondered if we could support student housing," CCS President Rick Rogers tells Model D. "Now, we're worried that we can't provide enough of it."