The dilemma of the urban university

As Portland State’s enrollment continues to increase by at least 2,000 students every year, the university’s need for more student and faculty space continues to run headlong into a dilemma that confronts many urban campuses located in cities with expensive real estate: the dilemma of infrastructural expansion.

Last fall, Associate Vice President of Finance and Administration Mark Gregory and his consulting team finalized the “University District Framework Plan,” a 120-page document that examines in great detail PSU’s long-term space needs as it relates to the university’s anticipated growth for the next 25 years.

According to the plan, “future growth at the university will be driven by three primary goals: to support the station’s educational access goals, to develop a stronger sense of campus community and to expand research opportunities at the university.”

However, PSU cannot really devise a far-reaching “master plan” for the campus’ projected growth, Gregory said.

Because it does not own a sprawling campus with plenty of open acreage like Oregon State University or the University of Oregon, PSU must lease, buy, construct or renovate its buildings as circumstances permit. Its approach to acquiring more space must, therefore, be a general one that accounts for the constraints of operating in downtown Portland.

“The city…has zoning codes and limitations on how much the campus can grow, so it’s not like we can just go slap up a building and do whatever we want,” Gregory said. “There’s a certain amount of carrying capacity downtown.”

Although PSU owns the overwhelming majority of its buildings—usually bought with some combination of state funding and money raised by the university—it does not own the space into which the university must expand, according to Provost Roy Koch.

“Clearly, the options around campus are limited in terms of buildings that are available,” Koch said. “So oftentimes we simply have to take advantage of a situation where someone is leasing a building in the neighborhood.”

Indeed, PSU’s annual population growth, which stands at 6–8 percent, is occurring at a faster rate than the university can buy or erect new campus buildings.

Such growth has been especially problematic within the last two years. As Oregon plunged into a recession and a greater proportion of the state’s workforce has turned to higher education for vocational refuge, PSU has had to lease space from private buildings—such as the Clay and Unitus Buildings—on a rather ad-hoc basis just to handle the sudden burst in enrollment levels.

“If you look at the way we use most of the space on campus, it’s actually not for classrooms,” Koch said. “As we get more students, we need more faculty, the people who work behind the scenes.”

When PSU does decide to erect a new building, the university must make sure it gets the most “bang for its buck,” given that the land around campus costs roughly $8 million per block, Gregory said. And since there is little room to build horizontally, there’s an immediate push to “go vertical.”

“We need all the height we can get,” he said.

For expediency’s sake, new buildings tend to be as mixed-use as possible. Classrooms are often located closer to ground level, with laboratories and research facilities higher up, and administrative offices higher still.

Yet from an aesthetic perspective, it is not advisable to erect a host of monolithic structures, according to Gregory. Stacked-boxed buildings of varying sizes, on the other hand, give the campus a more appealing shape—hence, the design of the Urban Center and Student Academic and Recreation Center.

Still, Gregory argues that the best and cheapest option is always for PSU to find a well-maintained,strategically located and fairly priced building already in existence. The newly purchased Market Center Building, for example, which began as a lease and became a full-blown PSU purchase last summer, met all of these criteria.

According to Gregory, PSU is always on the lookout for new buildings, and it is not out of the question that PSU’s outcroppings will eventually reach the waterfront.

“When you hear that our enrollment’s reversing, we will not be looking for space at that time,” Gregory said.

Gregory, however, added that he wishes PSU had more money to spend because buildings are cheaper now than at any time in recent memory.

The most expensive option is to renovate an old building that has fallen into disrepair. Both Shattuck Hall and the nearly condemned Lincoln Hall—which hail from 1915 and 1911, respectively—recently underwent desperately needed renovations.

According to Koch, the renovation of Science Building 2 is in its final stretches, and Neuberger Hall is next on the hit-list.

“There’s always at least one renovation project going on here,” Koch said.

Because PSU is forced to make the most of its available space, one does not stumble upon many idle areas on campus.

“In general, this university is space-deprived, so we’re pretty close to being fully used at all times,” Gregory said.

He added that the university tries to weed out inefficiencies wherever they crop up. Gregory and his staff must keep a vigilant eye on how departments employ the space allotted to them, lest a perfectly good would-be conference room go needlessly underused.?