Tag Archives: college campuses

Former suburban college campus to large youth sports facility

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Add another redevelopment option for suburban communities: large parcels of land, like former college campuses – Trinity International in Bannockburn, Illinois in this example, can become youth sports sites:

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Now he has pivoted from that proposal to a larger one on the Trinity campus, which already includes about 60 acres of sports fields and facilities. Donato said he will run indoor youth sports leagues immediately at an existing Trinity athletic center, but will ultimately raze the building and replace it with an indoor sports complex as large as 400,000 square feet. That building would combine with adjacent outdoor athletic fields to create what he envisions as a destination for area youth sports leagues and camps.

The project — which is subject to approval from the Village of Bannockburn — stands to breathe new life into a large suburban property that has been underutilized since Trinity closed in-person undergraduate programs there in 2023. The religious school announced in April that it would vacate the property entirely after the 2025-26 school year, adding it to the list of sprawling suburban properties in need of revitalization following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Donato said his planned indoor complex would include a professional-size soccer field, a gym with eight basketball courts and a portion of the building with “kids-oriented” activities such as bowling, miniature golf, an arcade, a restaurant and other attractions that could host as many as 5,000 kids on a given weekend. A portion of the existing grass field area would be converted into artificial turf fields.

As the college was shutting down there was one other redevelopment option that fell through:

Trinity had been working on a deal in 2024 to sell its campus to Dallas-based developer Hillwood, which publicly shared plans at the time to turn the site into a biotechnology and pharmaceutical research and technology park. A unit of Takeda Pharmaceuticals operates out of a building next to the campus along Lakeside Drive.

The option in the last paragraph is one that many suburbs would like: research and technology jobs in suburban offices. These are good jobs with high status companies.

Youth sports facilities are something else. They are part of a growing industry. (College and universities may be going the other way.) Suburban families and kids can have a lot of interest in sports. Such a facility can provide options for year-round activity.

And perhaps key to this: the youth sports facilities can generate revenue. Tax monies. Companies will be interested. Training kids in sports and providing sports entertainment can involve a lot of money.

A change in property status could bring out objections from neighbors. People get used to being near a college, now that property could become something else. But suburbanites like the idea that their kids are going to get ahead, suburban communities do not like vacant properties, and Americans like sports. And there is money to be made…

Build a dorm where 94% of the bedrooms have no windows in order to encourage more activity in common areas

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The construction of college dorms not not typically attract national attention but an unusual plan at the University of California–Santa Barbara and the architect who quit in protest did make the news:

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Billionaire Charlie Munger is bankrolling the design of a massive dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The $1.5 billion project comes with a major catch — 94% of the dorm’s single occupancy rooms are in the interior of the building, and have no windows.

A consulting architect on the university’s Design Review Committee quit in protest of the project, in a resignation letter obtained by CNN Business and reported by the Santa Barbara Independent…

Munger, the 97-year-old vice chairman of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, donated $200 million to UCSB to fund the dorms, with the caveat that his designs are followed. He wanted the dorm rooms to be tiny and windowless to encourage residents to spend more time outside in the common areas, meeting other students…

The rooms do have artificial windows, however, which Munger said resemble the Disney cruise ship’s artificial portholes where “starfish come in and wink at your children,” the Santa Barbara Independent reported.

The debate between Munger and the architect seems to come down to differing opinions on what the optimal residential experience is. Munger hopes that no windows would help students leave their rooms. The architect wants students to have access to natural light. Architecture often has ideas about how people in spaces should operate based on the physical surroundings. As my sociologist colleague Robert Brenneman and I argue in Building Faith, religious buildings are also built with specific experiences and behaviors in mind.

Three other factors connected to larger trends are interesting here:

  1. From what I have read, the demand for single-person rooms has increased at colleges. This provides students more private space. But, this may limit sociability and it could increase costs for everyone because more space is needed.
  2. I wonder what role smartphones play in all of this. Even with a window, smartphone use is pretty pervasive. Even with smartphone use, natural light and seeing the outside world has benefits.
  3. People with money and influence sometimes want to translate that status into physical buildings. If you have big money, you can help plan a significant building or attach your name to it. It would be interesting to see how long Munger’s name would continue to be attached to this particular building.

See an earlier post on spending a lot of time in windowless rooms.

Looking for productive ways to use the campuses of closed colleges

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When college campuses close, what happens to the land and buildings?

Saint Joseph is one of several small private liberal arts colleges across the country to have suffered that fate in recent years. In many of those cases, leaders are left wondering what to do with the shuttered campus. Under the wrong circumstances, buildings can remain locked and quads can lie fallow for years as banks try to recoup unpaid debts or brokers seek buyers who are willing to invest in land filled with outdated or dilapidated buildings…

Conversations between community and state leaders led to a search for partners interested in working with the college. That brought Vermont Works, an investment firm, and Vermont Innovation Commons, a benefit corporation that is a project of Vermont Works, into the picture.

Ideas grew for trying to offer education to a wide range of students, keep Vermonters in the state and attract new residents, Scott said. The direct path from high school through college to employment isn’t necessarily what employers or students want anymore. Professional skills, technical skills and experience are being emphasized much more today than they were in the recent past…

Across the country, the idea of repurposing closed or closing colleges is a critical planning problem, according to experts. College leaders need to be considering their prospects for the future and whether different models can help them fulfill their institutions’ missions, said Nicholas Santilli, senior director for learning strategy at the Society for College and University Planning.

Redeveloping large properties is not an easy task: see shopping malls, big box stores and large retail stores, and office parks. College campuses present their own unique challenges given how the land is used. Simply plopping a new organization into the same set of buildings is likely to be difficult. Location will matter as well; the story above used the example of a more rural college where there is limited demand for land.

As the story hints, it would be great to be able to use the property for an ongoing educational purpose to keep the mission of the college going. If that does not work, perhaps the land could be used for community purposes. Ultimately, simply turning the property back to the free market for commercial, industrial, or residential uses – which could generate more money and taxes for local communities – seems like it could be a loss. Given the predicted fate of numerous colleges and universities, perhaps we will have a landscape in a few decades where it will be hard to know that the land formerly housed a thriving higher education institution.

I wonder if there is a way for college campuses to head off the problem long before they need to close their doors. Would having more permeable membranes between the campus and the community better connect all the land uses? is the impulse to have a controlled campus a bad idea in the long run for communities?