CU Boulder outlines 20- and 30-year campus housing expansion, campus and off-campus projects
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Summary
University of Colorado Boulder officials presented a housing plan that aims to add thousands of campus-affiliated beds over decades, plus targeted projects for faculty, staff and graduate students including CU South, Residence 1 and a Colorado Avenue development.
Laurie Call, associate vice chancellor of local government and community engagement at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Chris Ewing, vice chancellor for infrastructure at CU Boulder, presented the university’s housing context and multi-decade plan to the Housing Advisory Board Tuesday evening.
Call said the university has about 37,000 students, of whom an estimated 33,000 live in Boulder — roughly 28,000 undergraduates and about 4,700 graduate students — and described a campus strategy that would add roughly 2,300 new on-campus beds over the next 20 years and 4,400–6,000 new beds over the next 30-plus years. “A lot of that has to do with the fact that graduation rates indicate that the longer students are on campus, the higher graduation rates,” Call said.
The presentation named several projects in different phases. Ewing described CU South as a long-term site envisioned mainly for faculty and staff housing, with an overall planning target of about 2,100 units but with master planning tied to a city flood-mitigation timeline; Ewing said detailed master planning would not begin until after flood mitigation work and that construction would likely be several years out, with planning activity through 2027 and beyond.
Ewing said Residence 1, the building under construction near Arapahoe and Marine, will provide about 330 beds and is expected to open in fall 2026; he said the building will be all-electric, include a small dining facility and be equipped to connect to a future low-temperature hot-water district loop. Call and Ewing also described a Colorado Avenue project with a private developer under a long-term ground lease, and a Louisville site near transit they purchased for graduate-student housing and potential mixed use. Call said the Louisville site is envisioned for graduate students and would be attractive to the city because it is on the RTD line and could bring retail and activity to that area.
On campus renovation work, Ewing described a planned modernization of older residence halls such as Farren Residence Hall, with the project design including upgraded accessibility and air conditioning and a move from steam to low-temperature hot water heating as part of the university’s climate plan. Call said many existing residence halls date from mid-20th century designs and the university plans staged renovations that will require temporary “swing” housing for students while older buildings are taken offline and rebuilt or modernized.
Board members asked for details the university did not have on hand, including counts of privately built student apartments in the pipeline and the precise unit mix for CU South. Call said CU planning monitors private development but that detailed private-development inventories are maintained by campus planning staff and outside consultants and were not included in the evening’s presentation. On a frequently asked question about whether CU’s housing growth numbers included private purpose-built student housing, Call said they do not: “So, it does not include the private,” she said. “Those numbers that you saw are just CU-affiliated housing.”
Call and Ewing emphasized that some off-campus projects, such as the Louisville and Longmont sites, are targeted to graduate students, faculty and staff, not the typical new-build “luxury” student housing often discussed in public comment. “CU South … is really envisioned as faculty [and] staff,” Ewing said. He added that one parcel the university expects to reserve for Boulder Housing Partners would target lower-income employees.
Call invited the board and public to a university-hosted virtual town hall on Sept. 24 to review housing and infrastructure projects and to submit questions in advance. The university also said it would continue planning outreach on specific projects.
The presentation included requests from board members for follow-up information on the number and profile of students on wait lists for on-campus housing, the university’s internal surveys of faculty and staff housing needs and the timeline and unit mix planned for CU South.
