A New Jersey developer has landed a $50 million project to house around 500 Dartmouth College students near the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
In May the college announced it was seeking to partner with a private builder for a 300-unit graduate and professional student housing complex n property the College owns on Mt. Support Road in Lebanon.
Michaels Student Living, a division of the Michaels Organization in Camden, New Jersey, will submit preliminary documents on the project to the city of Lebanon at the end of the month, the college said in a statement. The Lebanon Planning Board has scheduled a conceptual design review of the plans at its Jan. 13 meeting.
The project timetable has the apartments available for rent in the fall of 2022. They would be housed in four buildings, with a central community building and several small outbuildings also on the site.
“This is a new kind of project for Dartmouth, and we are glad Michaels is getting started on the planning and design work,” cJosh Keniston, vice president for institutional projects and interim vice president of campus services, said in a statement.
As the college works on a long-term agreement to develop the residences, Dartmouth officials are also working on plans to renew aging undergraduate residence halls, Keniston says.
The college won’t pay to develop, build or maintain the graduate apartment project, and rents would be paid by tenants to the developer. Dartmouth will retain ownership of the land and lease it to the Michaels Organization in a long-term agreement. The 53-acre property is about 3 miles from campus and is located on the east side of Mt. Support Road, just under a mile from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
Dartmouth’s agreement with Michaels is for pre-development work, including planning, design, preliminary permitting, and soil testing on the property. The college said it is in talks with Michaels for a long-term development agreement.
The project echoes the previously-built Sachem Village neighborhood, which Dartmouth built and owns, and is currently the largest development for graduate and professional students at the school. Located off Route 10 in Lebanon, it has 255 units, with a total of 527 beds in one-, two-, and three-bedroom dwellings. Currently, about 30 percent of Dartmouth’s more than 2,000 graduate students live in college-owned housing.
