UMass Boston Developments | Columbia Point | Dorchester

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armpitsOFmight said:
There's gerbil tubes everywhere on this campus. Also, UMASS Boston is really just one gigantic building with little islands of other buildings on top of it.
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Those gerbil tubes were a godsend during much of the school year when I was there in the early 1990s. The wind really whips the campus, and it's just not a nice place to be.

While I was there, I noticed students starting to use the handicapped door buttons at the entrance/exits between the tubes and buildings. Sure enough, over time more and more students started using the buttons. These were perfectly healthy young adults, and they would stop, press a button with one finger, and then wait while the door slooowly opened. I always thought this behavior was worth a study of some kind - the social contagion of laziness? - and the gerbil tube environment just made the idea seem more appropriate.
 
Are they putting in habitrails between all the new buildings?
 
DZH22 said:
This is the kind of effect the EF Building can only wish it accomplished with its "waterfall".
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Took the words right out of my mouth.

THIS works. The building would have looked so-so without it. It beautifully breaks the pattern. The EF building is too far gone on the boring office park look to be able to accomplish the same thing even with a taller and larger waterfall. You can't put enough lipstick on it. EF thinks of its waterfall as a "Get Out of Jail Card". This building doesn't solely rely on the glasswork..
 
UMass Boston’s plans for dorms dovetail with mayor’s housing goals

By Lauren Dezenski
Oct. 16, 2014

The University of Massachusetts Boston is exploring its options as it seeks to build residence halls to house 2,000 students on its Columbia Point peninsula campus by 2025, planning that the university says is in line with Mayor Martin Walsh’s just-released citywide housing plan to accommodate a population that is expected to grow beyond 700,000 residents by 2030.

“We’re very supportive of the housing plan and we agree that we need to do our part in helping provide places for students to live and relieve some of the pressure that off-campus students put on neighborhoods,” UMass Boston spokesperson DeWayne Lehman told the Reporter.

Across the city, the mayor’s report found, students living off-campus occupy rental units that would otherwise be available to middle class residents and families. For every three additional students housed on-campus, the study noted, one unit of rental housing is returned to the work-force housing market. “Therefore, student housing creation is a critical relief valve for Boston’s rental housing market,” the report concluded.

The city has given the outlines of what officials call an aggressive but achievable plan to locate 16,000 new university dorm beds in the next 15 years, a build-out the city says will free up 5,000 units of workforce housing across the city and reduce off-campus students by 50 percent.

With just shy of 3,000 students in the neighborhood as of last year, Dorchester is the fourth-most popular neighborhood for off-campus students, after the traditional student hubs of Allston-Brighton, Fenway/Kenmore, and Jamaica Plain/Mission Hill. But compared to Allston and Fenway, where rents average $1,900 and $2,300 respectively, Dorchester’s $1,600 number as of 2013 offers an inexpensive alternative for any student, much less a UMass Boston student eager to shorten the commute to campus.

UMass Boston noted its plan to build dorms in 2009, when the school rolled out its 25-year master plan, outlining the burgeoning research university’s scaled growth vision. The school settled on campus accommodations for 2,000, especially after conversations with neighborhood groups eager to get rowdy undergraduates out of their neighborhoods.

The first 1,000 on-campus beds were scheduled to be built by next fall near the terminus of Mount Vernon Street. However, that timetable has been pushed back. “The whole goal is to get student housing up as soon as possible,” said Lehman. “Fall 2015 was the target, but it was not realistic.” It is not clear yet when those buildings will go up, though Lehman said it would be “as soon as possible.”

Those first on-campus dorms will be geared toward first-year students in “housing that will provide for freshmen students a more structured environment,” Lehman said. The school continues to explore a number of options for the second round of 1,000, Lehman said, which could including a public-private partnership, though nothing is set in stone.

While UMass Boston is unique to date as the only large school in the city not offering on-campus housing, it is the only publicly funded university in Boston, a situation that leaves it subject to pulls on the purse strings by legislators. That is one of the reasons the 50-year-old university has focused on building academic buildings, Lehman said.

One of the options floated in the mayor’s housing report was dorm-building via public-private partnerships, creating centralized housing for students of multiple schools. “It would be an off-campus dorm space that would otherwise not be created” for schools without the resources to build multi-million dollar dorm complexes, said Devin Quirk, director of operations at the Department of Neighborhood Development. “It would get more students out of the private market.”

For UMass-Boston and its dorm plans, it is not clear what else, if anything, the school can do to better align itself with the city’s housing goals. To date, the city’s colleges and universities have been cooperative with the city, Quirk said, and were already on track to build 7,000 new on-campus beds before the mayor rolled out his vision for 16,000 new beds.

Over the next two years, the Boston Redevelopment Authority will work with the local colleges and universities to finalize numerical targets for dorm creation, Quirk said, as well as deadlines for decreasing dependence on private rental housing and reasonable on-campus rent prices.

But if the beds are built, will the students come? The city’s educational institutions were housing but 43 percent of a total of 84,000 undergraduates as of 2013. Of that total number, 20,000 searched out placements that were less costly than on-campus offerings, the study found. “We have to make sure on-campus housing or dorms in general are competitive in price to off-campus rentals,” Quirk said. “Otherwise students won’t move on campus.”
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Dorchester Reporter
 
UMass Building Authority explores “public-private” bid to build first-ever Dorchester dorm

“We’re doing a preliminary review of whether we can do public-private partnerships to build the 1,000 bed residence hall at UMass Boston that would serve freshman or first year students,” said Patricia Fillipone, the executive director of the UMass Building Authority. “We’re looking to partner with a developer to build that residence hall.”

On Dec. 8, the UMass Building Authority issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ), a document that serves to gaugue the interest of developers in the plan. According to Fillipone, there were eight respondents to the RFQ. The Building Authority is currently reviewing those responses, she said, and will then formulate a Request for Proposals (RFP) to solicit more formal bids from the development community.

“We would expect that it would happen sometime in the spring of 2015,” said Fillipone.

The budget for the new facility— which could be sited on one of two preferred locations on the UMass Boston campus— is estimated at $113 millio
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http://www.dotnews.com/2015/umass-building-authority-explores-public-private-bid-build-first-ever-
 
The Olympic Housing proposal includes permanent units on the edge of the UMass Boston Campus -- they need 16,000 beds for the Athletes Village -- and the proposal is for both permanent units and portable units -- with a net of 6,000 beds left for UMass Boston when the Olympics departs town at the end of August 2024

from pdf3 [Transportation, Accommodation + Security] of the Boston 2024 documents presented to the USOC available at http://www.2024boston.org/docs
Building Metrics
How many...?
...Buildings?
There are 13 residential buildings.
...Floors per building?
Most buildings are between 10 and 12.
...Units per building?
Buildings accommodate 25 - 30 units per floor.
...Size(s) of units?
Units are between 1,025 sf and 1,425 sf.
...Rooms per unit per building?
There are 3 or 4 rooms per unit per building.
...Beds per room per unit?
As per IOC regulation there are no more than 2 beds per room, yielding 6 to 8 beds per unit.
...Units proposed for Games use?
There will be 262 units or 16,500 beds available for Games use.
Will the units be sold?
A portion of the units may be converted for sale.
What is the target market for unit sales?
The target market for rental of this new housing is Millennials. This demographic wants to be close to the city, have access to rapid transit and values efficient design and technological capabilities over “luxuries.” There is a high demand for workforce and market rate housing in Boston and these sustainable homes would have instant appeal to this demographic.....

Post Games Use
What is the planned post-Games use?
The Athletes’ Village will revitalize Columbia Point and create a vibrant, transit-oriented, mixed-use waterfront district. The master planned redevelopment of the site will unlock transportation barriers created by Kosciuszko Circle by reorganizing the infrastructure and linking the surrounding neighborhoods including Dorchester, Harbor Point, the University of Massachusetts Boston campus and the proposed Village to each other and to Carson Beach and Joe Moakley Park. The proposed Athletes’ Plaza will become a waterfront retail destination for the entire City of Boston. Joe Moakley Park, one of Boston’s largest public spaces, will be vastly improved as adjacent neighborhoods will enjoy access to the sports complex and improved athletic fields. Increased capacity at JFK/UMass MBTA station will improve access to the district.
Post-Games, the housing will be returned to 6,000 beds of student housing for University of Massachusetts Boston. The remaining units will be converted into approximately 2,500 - 2,900 units of market rate housing. Some units will remain on site and a large number will be relocated to Boston neighborhoods for workforce housing
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