[T]he widely acclaimed East College Street Project … blends apartments and retail shops with street-smart, environmentally friendly architecture.

The $17 million development grew out of an unusual partnership: Three friends decided to stick around after graduating and change their college town for the better -- even though they knew nothing about real estate at the time….

The project precedes a larger development to come: Oberlin College's $300 million, 13-acre Green Arts District, which will include construction or renovation of a dozen buildings between East College Street at the Allen Memorial Art Museum a block to the north.

We missed this article from the Village Voice when it was published in late July. It's a nice survey of the various campus building projects in New York City, with some introspective commentary. 

But will these schools really need all of this space once it comes online? Ten years from now, will we be downloading courses via Facebook apps onto iPads? Could all that classroom space end up being about as useful as the new home once planned for the New York Stock Exchange? In 2002, the Big Board walked away from a $1.1 billion deal with the city, realizing advances in technology meant it no longer needed a physical trading floor.

It’s easy to understand why New York’s universities are optimistic. Last year, NYU saw a record 38,000 applications for freshman admission, four times what it received 20 years ago. Nationwide, college enrollment is predicted to grow 13 percent by 2018, but the U.S. Department of Education cautions that its forecast doesn’t factor in such potentially disruptive forces as the rising cost of college, the changing economic value of a degree, and “the impact of distance learning due to technological changes.”

A couple of weeks ago we shared a good article on this topic with you. Now we share the existence of the book the article came from, by Harvey Kaiser and Eva Klein, who are well known among SCUPers. APPA describes Strategic Capital Development with these words: 

[It] presents a bold approach for planning capital investments from a strategic and long-range perspective. The authors combine their extensive higher education experience and expertise to improve capital planning and decision-making and to make a case for a new model that seeks to balance idealism with pragmatism. They define stewardship principles necessary to create and sustain a physical plant that is responsive to institutional strategies and functions, that remains attractive to faculty and students, and optimizes available resources.

...

The proposed comprehensive model is presented as a fully integrated set of methodologies to assess needs and develop a prioritized capital projects plan, integrated with a physical master plan. The authors include, and advocate, the concept of a strategic funding framework--a larger view of feasible and desirable capital funding for defined capital needs.