Wayne State's most expensive student housing opens this week

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...pens-this-week

Students will start moving in Saturday to the 407-bed, 11-story center tower of Wayne State University's newest and priciest apartment complex.

The first phase of the three-building, $111 million mixed housing-retail project is coming online for the fall semester.

Almost no one lived on the WSU campus back in the mid 1980's
Perhaps all that parking money we put into the structures helped.

2002. The year Wayne State's first residence hall opened, and the course to no longer being a commuter school was underway.


And the campus, and the neighborhood, continue to evolve.

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Originally Posted by 48202

2002. The year Wayne State's first residence hall opened, and the course to no longer being a commuter school was underway.

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Not entirely true. The Webster Hall Hotel was bought by the city in 1946 as a residence hall for students at what was then Wayne University to help students in the then very housing-strapped city [[hard to believe now, but true). My mother lived there while a student for 2 years in the late 40s, since she was working on campus and it helped her avoid a long streetcar & bus ride at night out to Cherrylawn & Schoolcraft. Webster Hall was immediately full to bursting, so the university also bought or leased other surrounding hotels and apartment buildings for student and faculty residences.

By the late '50s though, with much more housing having been built around the metro area, and with a huge increase in students who commuted by car, demand for residence hall space declined. Soon after the state takeover of the school all residence halls were closed, and the renamed Mackenzie Hall was turned into office space [[and blown up in 1991 to be replaced by a parking garage).

Old Wayne U. graduates will tell you this is because the heads of the state's other major universities, as part of the deal to allow the state takeover, wanted to make sure WSU had no residential component that could compete with their schools [[particularly John Hannah at MSU, who opposed the state takeover of Wayne, and who at that time used up more state dorm-building funds than all of the other schools combined).

WSU leaders struggled for over 40 years to get new residence halls built, but the state always turned them down. Finally, in the early 2000s, they succeeded.

It sure looked different on campus back in the mid 1980's.
WSU struggled with accreditations over the years as well.
Many parents in suburbs were Racially Biased against a ""City University"".
I worked a 40hr week drafting/design and made it through
the Engineering College for a BSIE. [[commuting made it possible)

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Originally Posted by EastsideAl

Not entirely true. The Webster Hall Hotel was bought by the city in 1946 as a residence hall for students at what was then Wayne University to help students in the then very housing-strapped city [[hard to believe now, but true). My mother lived there while a student for 2 years in the late 40s, since she was working on campus and it helped her avoid a long streetcar & bus ride at night out to Cherrylawn & Schoolcraft. Webster Hall was immediately full to bursting, so the university also bought or leased other surrounding hotels and apartment buildings for student and faculty residences.

By the late '50s though, with much more housing having been built around the metro area, and with a huge increase in students who commuted by car, demand for residence hall space declined. Soon after the state takeover of the school all residence halls were closed, and the renamed Mackenzie Hall was turned into office space [[and blown up in 1991 to be replaced by a parking garage).

Old Wayne U. graduates will tell you this is because the heads of the state's other major universities, as part of the deal to allow the state takeover, wanted to make sure WSU had no residential component that could compete with their schools [[particularly John Hannah at MSU, who opposed the state takeover of Wayne, and who at that time used up more state dorm-building funds than all of the other schools combined).

WSU leaders struggled for over 40 years to get new residence halls built, but the state always turned them down. Finally, in the early 2000s, they succeeded.

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And now, with downtown and Midtown looking the best they have in decades, there's also more demand by students who want to live on campus. I'm sure Wayne will always have a large commuter population, but this is now part of a virtuous cycle in Midtown.