By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
NEWPORT — When students, faculty or visiting researchers show up in 18 months to take or teach classes at the Hatfield Marine Science Center there should be 77 more apartments available for them to use.
Oregon State University’s board of trustees Friday approved construction of a $16.5 million apartment building on five acres of land near Oregon Coast Community College that it has owned for eight years.
The university hopes to begin clearing the site this fall and open the housing to students, faculty and visiting researchers during the winter of 2025.
Although scaled back substantially from original 2015 plans, the apartments are intended to help fulfill an OSU promise to provide workforce-style housing to the greater number of students and faculty using its three-year-old Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building on Yaquina Bay.
“A lot of investment has been made by the university at Hatfield Marine Science Center,” Bob Cowan, vice president of research and operations told YachatsNews. “We’ve seen lots of growth with more classes and more students … so the need for housing is clear.”
The three-story L-shaped building will have 77 units and a total of 82 bedrooms – 72 types of studio apartments and five two-bedroom apartments. If the demand is there and fills up, there is room on the property for a second building, Cowan said.
The project is being financed with $10 million in OSU-paid bonds and $6.5 million from the state.
Original plans didn’t work
The idea for student and faculty housing was part of the plans when OSU proposed and built its new $62 million marine studies building in the South Beach area of Newport.
“We had housing needs … but if we were to bring in new students we made a commitment to build outside the tsunami zone,” Cowan said. “We need to work at the water but we don’t need to be sleeping there.”
The apartment property is in the Wilder development is three-quarters of a mile south of the marine center.
But initial designs came up with a project costing $50 million, he said, which wasn’t financially feasible. Also, projections for the number of students, faculty and researchers using the new marine science center had also changed – which meant the university could scale back its size.
“The business model just didn’t work,” Cowan told YachatsNews.
The new Hatfield center has a big impact on the central Oregon coast. Not only is it the center for ocean research, but it employs more than 400 people, including 35 OSU faculty and lead researchers, serves 35-40 more from state and federal agencies and has a $45 million yearly operating budget. The three-story building has classrooms, offices, research areas, meeting rooms, a café, 250-seat auditorium and can serve as a “vertical” evacuation site for the area in case of a large tsunami.
But it opened in September 2020 – six months into the coronavirus pandemic – forcing classes online and researchers to slow or stop much of their work.
On Thursday, Cowan told an OSU board finance committee that the number of courses being offered has grown from eight to 48 the past seven years.
He said in 2015 there were 100 mostly undergraduate students taking one or two terms of classes at the center. That has grown to 450 students a year, the majority of them graduate students.
There has been a 33 percent increase in resident faculty, he said, who are newer and younger “creating a greater need for housing.”
“We had promised Newport not to create a housing issue … this is part of that solution,” he said in an interview. “We changed our model. We’re essentially building flexible workforce housing now for graduate students, researchers and visiting professors.”
- Quinton Smith is the editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com
Absolutely wonderful opportunities for students and faculty! Amazing!!