On Thursday, June 23, Dartmouth College announced that instead of building a proposed apartment-style housing complex for undergrads on a portion of Garipay Field, it now wants to place them at the north end of the former golf course, on the west side of Lyme Road between the roundabout and the Hanover police/fire building. VP of Institutional Projects Josh Keniston spoke to Daybreak about the switch and the college’s long-term plans for the stretch of land between the medical school and the proposed complex.

Thanks for being willing to talk. First off, could you explain why the college decided the west side of Lyme Road would be better than the original Garipay proposal?

JK: The big piece is that we heard a lot of community feedback about how the community uses Garipay and how the community thinks about the Lyme Road area. This move is very much in response to that community feedback.

One of our challenges in responding was being able to make sure we had our long-range plan in place for future academic uses up there. That was one of the challenges we had to overcome—we did several months of work with our planning consultants, and feel confident we can fit this near-term housing use with longer-term academic uses for the west side.

And could you explain a bit about what those longer-term uses might look like? Do you have specific plans for what the college would like to put there?

JK: At this point we don’t have specific academic programs that will fit there. The work with the planning team has created a concept for a campus structured around a greenway—you’ll have housing at the northern end, which is the immediate project, and then a central strip of land with green space and open space, and then academic buildings built around that greenway. I think the vision for the academic piece will come over time.

Some faculty members have expressed concern about putting several hundred students at a pretty distant remove from the core campus, arguing that it runs counter to the traditional, close-knit Dartmouth experience. In the college’s write-up about the new housing, interim Dean Scott Brown says, “We will prioritize building strong connections to existing residential life.” Could you explain what that means?

JK: Part of this is how we think about the different layers of the student experience. The first piece of this is that during the early years, when students are freshmen and sophomores and when they most need connection, they will still be in housing that is proximate to the Green. Those years will still be based around the Green. We know that a lot of our housing there is in desperate need of renovation, so in many ways that core critical experience will be better, because we can now finally get going on that renovation cycle.

Some students in their junior and senior years will be farther away, and we need to be intentional with the shuttle system, with house officers, and with how we create programming for them. But we already see junior and senior students wanting to step out, so we’re trying to find a middle ground, where they won’t be around the Green but will have college programming. We view all this as a spectrum and are trying to introduce another aspect to that spectrum.

Our sense is that the maximum we’re targeting (for the Lyme Road housing) is 400 students. The goal is not to be for all the students. And what we’re hearing and seeing is there’s a subset of students for whom the independence and flexibility of getting to choose who they live with and having a kitchen will be a really positive experience.

I know that shifting housing to the west side is in response to concerns from neighborhood residents—but even so, there are still going to be 400 undergrads living up there. Could you talk a bit about what you heard from residents and how you think this responds to them?

JK: The move to the west side I think is responsive to some of the early concerns they had, in terms of specific proximity and the impact it was going to have on some of the recreation spaces up there. Our hope is that this move addresses at least some of those concerns—we know there are concerns about transportation and traffic and the impact on the neighborhood.

So our goal is to host a series of sessions to work with community to find solutions to all of that. While we might not make everyone happy, we can co-develop a plan that will actually improve the options up there. Our plan is to make open recreation spaces more accessible and make improvements to the roundabout that will make it flow better for everyone. We’ll announce five specific meetings and develop others around those, so that we can co-develop solutions that are a win-win for everyone.