Ground Broken on Housing to Serve Transfer Students

Ioana Patringenaru | Oct. 8, 2007

From left to right: Jamie Awford, vice president of Turner Construction, Chancellor Marye Anne Fox and former Vice Chancellor Joe Watson at last week's groundbreaking.

“One, two, three!” Shovels dug in and dirt flew up in the air as Chancellor Marye Anne Fox and other campus officials broke ground Oct. 1 on a campus housing complex that will serve more than 1,000 transfer students.

“Today’s groundbreaking demonstrates our commitment to providing much-needed on-campus housing,” Fox said.

Known as the Village at North Torrey Pines, the project is located just north of Eleanor Roosevelt College and across from the Rady School of Management and is set to open fall 2009. It will include three and four-story buildings as well as one 14-story tower, a café and a bookstore. It also will be the first housing complex to offer a 12-month housing guarantee, Fox said. Other undergraduate projects only offer a nine-month guarantee. The Village will eventually house about 1,800 students, once a second phase of construction is completed in fall 2010.

The Village at North Torrey Pines will include a 14-story tower.

The project, which will cost about $122 million, is part of a four-year, $450 million construction effort to house more than 4,000 additional students on campus. The ultimate goal is to provide campus housing to about 50 percent of the study body. The construction push will put UCSD within about two percentage points of that target. Right now, about 39 percent of students live on campus.

It’s time for the campus to recognize that upper division students deserve to be on campus too, Fox said at Friday’s ceremony. Transferring to UCSD is something you do, not something you are, said Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Penny Rue. “It’s really an exciting moment for all of us,” she said.