OU President Joseph Harroz told the Daily Friday that although demolition plans are being made for Adams Center, the structure will stand through the summer. Locations are also being considered for new student housing additions.
At the March 5 OU Board of Regents meeting, Harroz first announced the “freshman housing master plan.” The plan will replace OU’s Adams, Walker and Couch towers with new living options containing a total of 3,350 beds.
Beginning demolition would have originally taken more time, but the university’s purchase of the Cross Village housing complex accelerated the replacement of Adams “by four years,” Harroz wrote in a March 31 email announcing the Cross transaction. OU is planning to remove reusable materials from the towers, like room number plates and reusable heat and air components, before the building is destroyed.
Adams will not be occupied next fall, Harroz said, since Cross’ 1,200 beds offset the 908 beds lost by vacating Adams.
“It doesn’t take someone who lived in … Adams to know that it just wasn’t viable (any longer), and it wasn’t,” Harroz said. “For us it was punctuated by the (February winter storm). We had 200 students out of 900 that had to not be in a room because of pipes bursting. When you look at the storms that came through, it just doesn’t work to have Adams up.”
To secure Cross for freshman — a move many called for since the complex’s 2018 opening — OU settled outstanding litigation with Provident Oklahoma Education Resources, Inc. the organization that helped construct Cross Village. According to documents from the Electronic Municipal Market Access, the settlement amount is $180 million.
While OU has begun the process allowing it to issue bonds to fund the construction of new student housing, the litigation and OU’s decision to opt out of renewing Cross’s commercial and parking lease has not significantly impacted the university’s bond rating.
Mary Ellen Wriedt, the primary S&P Global analyst who works on the organization’s OU rating, said in an April 15 interview OU’s bond rating remains an A+ — among the highest rankings it can achieve. While the litigation did cause S&P Global to consider OU’s overall rating outlook as “negative,” this only serves as a potential projection for future ratings. Now that the litigation has been resolved, Wriedt said, S&P Global will likely review its OU rating.
The questions of where the new housing structures will be built and what they will look like is still being considered, Harroz said.
“We're not ready to announce anything, because part of what we've asked (the architecture firm) to do is tell us what the options are,” Harroz said. “We're looking at a lot of options — are they five story, are they nine story — we're looking at best practices. They're going to come back with recommendations.”
The new housing’s location and layout is contingent on a myriad of factors, Harroz said, from how these aspects will allow students to feel like they’re a central part of campus to how they will facilitate campus involvement.
“The goal is, how do you create the best living communities for students? Can you make it where it's easier for students to live, go to classes, engage in group organizational activity in a way that is more efficient,” Harroz said. “That's part of the calculus in this, and that's what we're paying these folks for to come back and provide some recommendations.”
