(11-16-2019, 08:29 PM)jwilliamson Wrote:(11-16-2019, 05:56 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: Depends how much you build. UW has only added MKV and CMH since I came in 1993, and REV was built in approximately 1965 as far as I can tell. If they had continued to build more residences, presumably not as many student apartments would have been created in nearby locations.
There's also a new tower at UWP, and at least Grebel and St. Jerome's have had major expansions in the last few years.
I believe the only new tower at UWP is CMH. Have they built another newer tower?
I’m pretty confident Grebel has added less than 100 beds since 1993. St. Paul’s, Renison, and St. Jerome’s have all added some, but even so, it’s not proportional to the size of the institution. Overall, it’s a change in approach. In the 60s, it seems to have been assumed that a large fraction of students would live in residence; now, it is assumed that only a small minority will live in residence.
I don’t particularly have an opinion on which is better, although there is something to be said for students to concentrate on their studies, not worry about dealing with groceries and landlords. On the other hand, the idea that residence is a good place to concentrate on ones studies is somewhat hilarious. I also take Dan’s point above that it’s good for students to integrate into the larger community. Of course that can be done in many ways; and I think entertainment and leisure activities may be more important for that than whether the apartment building one lives in, full of students, is owned by the University or by a rental company.
In any case my original point was that if students want apartment buildings close to Conestoga College, and developers are having trouble building them due to zoning and NIMBY problems, it might make sense for Conestoga College to use some of its space to build residence buildings. And this would indeed reduce traffic associated with classes, as everybody in residence could just walk to their classes. Indeed, with careful design, they could do so without even going outside. So you would split the existing traffic all around class time into two smaller sets of traffic, some around class time from students who don’t live in residence, and some at other times from students who do live in residence going out to other activities.