The off-campus housing boom hasn’t hurt the dormitories. Associate director of campus living Aaron Lucier reports that nearly 82 percent of freshmen choose to live in one of ECU’s 5,301 dorm rooms. The last new dorm to be built on campus, College Hill Suites, opened in 2006. It offers some upscale touches, like kitchenettes in every unit, for more money and stays full. With all the dorms full, that still leaves more than 10,000 upperclassmen who choose to live off campus, and many are opting for the big-box complexes with the long list of amenities. Suffering in this competition are the older complexes and neighborhoods that just a few years ago were the hot spots for students. Pirates Cove and other familiar neighborhoods nearer to campus are losing tenants to the new places. Places that once had waiting lists now have several vacancies. This leads some to wonder if developers are overbuilding the market. “We’re building all these complexes, and then the complexes that used to be in existence back then are not the prime real estate anymore,” said Michelle Lieberman, ECU’s director for off-campus and community
living. She believes some out-of-town developers based their plans just on East Carolina’s enrollment growth and didn’t factor in that about 4,000 are distance education students. An adult student taking Internet classes from Missouri has no need for an apartment. “Our actual rental population that I work with is about 10 to 12 thousand, and it has stayed pretty steady,” she adds. Students are the winners Of course, the winners in this competitive market are the students, with each complex trying to be more lavish, more convenient and less expensive than its competitors. Each touts a distinctive supply of bells and whistles. But as hard as each apartment community markets itself, students’ decisions often have less to do with the number of tanning beds than by where their friends live. Sophomore Baird Blackley from Shelby has lived in the dorms for two years—first in Umstead and this year in College Hill Suites—but she signed a lease at Copper Beech for fall semester. Blackley and her three dorm roommates were
drawn by the convenience and the privacy of Copper Beech, she said, and because they don’t have to buy a meal plan. She says they will actually shell out a little less than they paid to stay in the dorm. “My roommates’ parents were a little concerned that they weren’t built yet,” she said of the Copper Beech community going up on 10th Street. “But they have until August, and I know they’ll be finished.” Sophomore Bryan Strothmann from Raleigh has gone full circle on his housing choices. He spent his freshman year in the dorm. Then he moved to NCC his sophomore year, attracted by old roommates who had moved there and the lure of easy parking. But he has had enough of big-box apartment living, he said. Next year he’s moving to a three-bedroom house on Elm Street just off campus. “We wanted to be closer to campus,” said Strothmann, who will divide rent payments with his roommates and figure out utility costs. “And it’s training for the real world.” At their Elm Street house, Strothmann and his roommates will be an increasingly rare breed at ECU—off-campus renters who are close enough to actually walk to 29