Boston University will offer a new apartment-style on-campus housing option at 1047 Commonwealth Ave. starting next semester, said Marc Robillard, executive director for BU Auxiliary Services.
The option to sign up to live in 1047 Commonwealth Ave. in the fall is already available for current and incoming BU students on the My Housing Portal, Robillard said. The building, only available to undergraduate students, will house up to 347 students and serves to substitute the space loss due to the renovation of Myles Standish Hall and Myles Annex, Robillard said.
“[The renovation] leaves us 320, 330 beds short,” Robillard said. “We were looking for places to accommodate these students [who live in Myles and Myles Annex], because we don’t want to say, ‘No we’re not going to house you.’ One of the options that was presented to us is a new building that’s being renovated and constructed [on 1047 Commonwealth Ave].”
The new residence will only operate for two years, until the renovations of Myles and Myles Annex are complete, BU Residence Life Director David Zamojski, wrote in an email. There will also be no specialty housing offered at this new location, he added.
“I expect that each floor will be ‘general housing,’” Zamojski wrote.
Robillard said the new dormitory is planned to accommodate studio apartment-style rooms that range from single occupancy to triple occupancy in each room.
“We’re going to build 180 micro-units, which are essentially studio apartments,” Robillard said. “One hundred and sixty-one of them will be double occupancy, five will be single occupancy and three will be triples.”
The currently renovated apartments will be fully furnished with utilities by fall, simultaneous to the beginning of Myles and Myles Annex’s renovation, Robillard said.
“Every unit, all 180 of them, will have a kitchen, a full-size refrigerator, a full-size stove, a microwave oven, a dishwasher and in-unit washer and dryer,” Robillard said. “They’re apartments, so they’re going to go at apartment-style rates. A dining plan is not required. There will be security at the front door 24/7, and there will be 10 resident assistants.”
Myles and Myles Annex, the oldest dorms at BU, will undergo a three-phase renovation beginning May 2016 to August 2018, The Daily Free Press reported Jan. 20. The renovation will restructure the floor layout and fix the decaying outside façade.
1047 Commonwealth Ave. was originally planned to house the Sassoon Academy hairdressing school until it “fell apart” and then welcomed a new developer who was going to build 180 studio apartments, Robillard said. The developer then agreed to BU’s request to lease the property for student housing purposes.
Robillard said the university need to make changes to its Institutional Master Plan, a zoning and planning document required by the Boston Redevelopment Authority that needs to be updated with information of recent projects.
“There’s still an approval process that we have to go through, because the university doesn’t have the right just to take any piece of property and use it as a student dormitory,” Robillard said. “There’s a lot of moving parts, but those all have very clear paths for completion.”
Several students said 1047 Commonwealth Ave. will be a nice addition to BU’s housing because they prefer apartment-style, while others said the drastic location change from Myles to the new apartment is inconvenient.
Ange Wu, a freshman in the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said she favors the apartment-style.
“I prefer the apartment-style dorm,” she said. “It’s so hard to get a whitestone anyway. Having more apartments as an option will be a good addition.”
Catherine Huynh, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she shares the sentiment.
“It’s so hard to get an apartment off-campus,” she said. “I like the idea of having on-campus apartments.”
Nicole Goodnough, a junior in the Questrom School of Business, said extra space in the new dorm would not satisfy the need of those who lived in Myles because students used to living in Myles will have difficulty adjusting to West Campus.
“[The new dorm] is a good combination, but it’s still hard for students to move from East to West because there is such a change in scenery,” Goodnough said. “A lot of students who live in Myles go to Questrom, so [having to move to West] makes a two-minute commute … a mile-long commute.”
