 The townhouse basements will remain, as plans to convert them into apartments are abandoned
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The garden apartments are no more.
Vice President of Student Affairs Mark Reed confirmed in an e-mail Friday that the controversial plans to convert townhouse basements into additional housing had fallen through due to financial complications.
"The bids for the work were exceeding the financial estimates at a ratio that wasn't desirable to move forward at this point in time," he said in a Connecticut Post article.
The original plan, presented in late January, was to convert the townhouse basements into either two or four person apartments, depending on the size of the house. These new apartments would have added approximately 90 more beds to a campus in desperate need for more housing.
30-40 percent of freshmen live in converted triples, Fairfield's lawyer John Fallon told the Connecticut Post, and more students than the university would like are already living off-campus. Reed echoed this sentiment in an article in the January 25 edition of The Mirror.
Additional housing is still coming, however, as the plans to renovate the suite-style St. Ignatius Hall are still going ahead as planned.
The new living space should accommodate 68 juniors and seniors by September 2008, and the Jesuits hope to be moving to new lodgings, closer to Bellarmine Hall. Reed stressed in his e-mail that this new residence was the key to the conversion of St. Ignatius Hall.
"(The plan is still in motion), but, of course, contingent on the construction of a new Jesuit community center on campus. This was explained previously."
Plans for this project had yet to be submitted to the town's Zoning Department as of May 17, according to the article in the Post.
Little will change for students during the upcoming school year, however, since both plans were set for a 2008 completion. This includes the status of the basements.
Following a fire in one of the basements, the university locked the popular party spots to ensure that they were not being used for anything but storage. This stance, according to Reed, will continue to be enforced.
"The basements of the townhouses are not permitted for use, and this will remain the same. Dr. Thomas Pellegrino, dean of students, wrote to students in the spring and explained the reasons for this. They are very compelling."
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