UNC-Chapel Hill announces site for first new dorm in almost 20 years
UNC-Chapel Hill plans to open a new residence hall in 2028, its first new dorm since 2006.
The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees announced the site for what it's calling New Residence Hall 1 in a meeting on Wednesday.
It will be located between Stacy Residence Hall and Cobb Residence Hall on the north end of the campus, on the current site of Jackson Hall. In order to begin the project, the 83-year-old Jackson Hall, which houses the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, will be demolished.
The new dorm is expected to house anywhere from 600 to 700 students and is anticipated to cost $93 million. The university plans to begin construction in 2026.
'It's going to be in a terrific location right there in the heart of North Campus,' UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts said Thursday. 'We're excited about it.'
This project is just one of many housing improvements in the university's 'decade-long plan to expand and renew Carolina's undergraduate and graduate student housing portfolio,' according to a statement to The News & Observer from UNC Media Relations.
Roberts also told reporters Thursday that the renovation in Avery Residence Hall, which has been ongoing since late 2024, is nearing completion.
Roberts said he wants more of UNC's students to live in the dorms.
Twenty-nine percent of UNC students live in the residence halls, according to a report to the Board of Governors in January detailing the housing rate of each institution in the UNC System. However, roughly half of all undergraduate students live in UNC's residence halls.
'But as everyone who goes to school here knows, some of our housing is pretty old,' Roberts told reporters. 'Because housing is always aging out and requiring renovation, we also have an obligation to look at building new housing.'
The university is still looking for a new location for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, according to its statement to The N&O.
'On behalf of students, thank you. I think it's the beginning of a new plan to modernize our housing, and finally lets us catch up to our peer institutions,' said UNC Student Body President Aldolfo Alvarez, who also serves as a member on the Board of Trustees.
The announcement comes as UNC's admissions rise. The latest class to enter the university had a record 73,192 applicants, and 5,624 of them were accepted and enrolled, contributing to the university's 7.7% enrollment increase since 2020.
UNC has not yet released the number of new students enrolled for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Roberts wants the university to continue growing. He announced in a January Board of Trustees committee meeting that UNC would open 500 additional slots for students for admission in 2025.
The N&O reported that Roberts intends for the university's undergraduate enrollment to increase by 5,000 students in the next decade.
With the increase in enrollment, some UNC students have expressed concerns about housing availability for students after their first year, the Daily Tar Heel reported.
Freshmen are required to live on campus, with some exceptions. Because students with a higher amount of credits receive second priority, sophomores often are least likely to get a housing assignment, the newspaper reported.
One student wrote a column in the Daily Tar Heel and likened the housing process at UNC to the game show 'Survivor.'
Last June, the university asked some students to voluntarily opt out of their housing assignments for the upcoming year to make more rooms available for incoming freshmen, the Daily Tar Heel reported. If enough students did not volunteer to move to another residence hall, the newspaper reported, the university said it would use a lottery system to reassign housing.
Enough students volunteered, so the lottery system was not used.
UNC will also continue demolishing the remaining buildings in Odum Village, its long out-of-commission undergraduate, graduate and family housing built in the 1960s.
Demolition of Odum Village's 47 buildings began in 2016 due to their inability to meet fire safety standards. Evan Yassky, UNC's executive director of facilities planning and design, said that it was more cost effective to demolish the unusable dorms rather than renovate them, UNC Media Hub reported.
However, the project was not completed due to insufficient funding, Yassky said at Wednesday's Board of Trustees meeting. More than 20 buildings remain.
Just three buildings in Odum Village are still used by the university, one of which is the Carolina Veterans Resource Center, according to UNC Media Hub. The university is 'actively working to relocate' the center, UNC Media Relations said in a statement to The N&O.
The other two buildings are being used by UNC Police and contractors for the construction of Steven D. Bell Hall, which is set to finish by the end of this year, the university said.
Yassky hopes to demolish 20 more buildings 'roughly by the end of 2025.'
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