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Old Posted Oct 26, 2007, 10:00 AM
TXlifeguard TXlifeguard is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 170
These aren't dorms, and are in no way affiliated with the university. The reporter was either rushed, sloppy, misinformed, or purposely misleading readers. I don't care to speculate as to the reasons why.

The headline and tone of the article seem to indicate a relationship between the property and the university, which is not the case. These are inexpensively built apartments geared towards students with individual lease liability. The site is about a mile from campus proper, past Valereo, on land owned by the Santikos family. Will it be primarily for UTSA students? Sure, cause I cant imagine a family of three moving in there; most of the complexes close to campus are pretty rowdy sometimes. But to also refer to it as a 'UTSA project' as in the last paragraph could lead some readers to assume that this was done in partnership with the university itself, or would take students as part of the regular university housing stock, which it wont.

UTSA has actually moved away from housing partnerships, and back into direct ownership and management of housing complexes on campus. The University Oaks Apartments is built and managed by the former Century Housing, now known as CLV on land leased to the company until 2017. They also are the managers of the Chisholm Hall dorm complex. Together, these two complexes make up about 60% of the beds on campus. University Oaks was built with some substantial design flaws, and CLV lost most of what trust they had with the university in 2002 when toxic mold was found in the dorm complex. CLV knew about it and acted slowly to fix the situation, putting the students in danger and the university at risk. Most of the then residents lost a majority of their possessions and it was a PR embarrassment for the university. Shortly thereafter UTSA went back into the housing business for the first time in a decade with new construction. It's pretty apparent that there is no love lost on CLV from the university's standpoint; the master plan for the university shows the student apartments being bulldozed at the first available date per the contract and replaced with other housing, and; a careful reading of the university housing website pretty much tells potential students how to avoid getting placed into a CLV property when applying for student housing.

Yeah, way more than anyone cares to know about housing at UTSA, but even the title of this thread is misleading; it should read 'New student housing planned near UTSA.' Yeah, there is a need for more housing immediate to campus, but I'm not impressed with this property (from the pictures of similar properties in the state). If this was a UTSA development, it would actually look better.
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