By Danny Deza and Rachel Zarrell
Northeastern officials have yet to express interest in leasing space in a planned private dormitory housed partially in the YMCA building on St. Boltoph Street. The project is slated to be completed in fall 2011, according to the developers.
Following concern from the community and local universities, the developers, Phoenix Property Co., and Lincoln Property Co. have altered their model of leasing directly to students, and will instead lease blocks of rooms to neighboring colleges, who will in turn lease the suites to their students.
John Capellano, the senior vice president for development and construction at Lincoln Property Co., said “four or five” local schools have already expressed interest in leasing from the GrandMarc private residence hall.
Despite the proximity of GrandMarc to campus, Northeastern is not among the list of interested schools.
“I want to say we’ve had six or seven meetings with various people at Northeastern in several departments and we have never gotten any kind of interest,” Capellano said. “We really never talked very much about Northeastern students being in the building.”
In Boston, which has a competitive real estate market with nearly 30 colleges in close proximity to many smaller universities, like the Berklee College of Music are forced to look for alternative options.
“Right now, Berklee houses about 20 percent of its students and we are interested in developing more dormitories,” said Bill Whitney, vice president for real estate and campus planning at Berkelee. “And the difficulty we have found is that we don’t have a large campus such as Northeastern, and the land is expensive and hard to come by.”
Although construction for the GrandMarc has not started, meetings between the Dallas-based developers and local schools have been in the works; born from these meetings are a handful of local schools rooting for the residence hall to pass review from the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA).
“We have talked to them and expressed our interest and we’ve met with them on a couple of occasions, most recently a few weeks ago,” Whitley said. “It would be a good option for us.”
However, many local residents and Northeastern students have expressed doubts about the project.
“I think that the biggest issue is it has 800 people that are coming into the community and there are concerns what the company will do with the building once it is built,” said Resident Student Association Vice President for Housing Services Matt Soleyn.
During the next few weeks, RSA will be conducting presentations and discussing plans with the housing service committee to prepare a formal statement against the GrandMarc project.
Student Government Association (SGA) Vice President for Student Services Ryan Fox said SGA would also consider making a statement about the project after gauging student opinion on it.
Soleyn said the Phoenix Property Company has constructed buildings for the University of California at Riverside and the University of Minnesota. Both the buildings the company built for the schools have recieved low satisfaction ratings from students, as low as 22 percent approval, Soleyn said.
Despite students’ and residents’ opposition to the project, City Councilor Michael Ross, who represents the Northeastern area, said the GrandMarc project could be beneficial to Northeastern and the neighborhood if everyone cooperates.
“I think the proposal works best for Northeastern and it would be best for the school because of the [close] location [to campus], and we all know that Northeastern needs to build more dorms for its growing population,” Ross said. “Every proposal has a few bumps with the local community.”
Members of the community expressed outrage with the project at a public meeting held in the YMCA with the Phoenix Property Co. last week, said Student Government Association President Rob Ranley, who was at the meeting.
“I guess [the community] felt [the Phoenix Property Co] didn’t go through the standard procedure as the universities do to get student housing built,” Ranley said.
After a year of discussion with the local community, president of Symphony United Neighbors Barbara Simmons has scheduled meetings on the lack of developers addressed neighborhood concerns.
Fox and Soleyn also attended the meeting.
“I can tell you that no one in the neighborhood is for the GrandMarc project
