A 2023 rendering of a proposed undergraduate housing project near Centennial Woods, which University of Vermont officials have said they are no longer pursuing. Image courtesy of the University of Vermont.
The University of Vermont is stopping plans for a new undergraduate housing complex that would have accommodated about 540 students, citing soaring construction costs and a lack of available labor.
“With interest rates where they are, and the competition for labor in the Burlington area right now, the price tag was going to drive rents so it really wouldn’t have been affordable for students to live there,” said Richard Cate, the university’s chief financial officer, in an interview Monday. “There’s no point in building when it’s not going to work for them.”
School officials informed the board of trustees of the decision during the board’s recent meeting, briefly mentioning the news in a press release on Saturday.
The Catamount Woods project, first announced in August 2023, would have been built on what is currently a parking lot near the DoubleTree hotel at the southern edge of Centennial Woods — an extension eastward into South Burlington from the university’s main campus in Burlington.
The university signed an agreement with AAM 15 Management LLC that month to build the roughly $100 million complex, with the goal of housing students there by the fall of 2025.
The development had been making its way through South Burlington’s Development Review Board, with university and city officials hashing out zoning concerns around density and the number of units that could have been built on the property.
Those permitting considerations affected plans for the project, but “could have been overcome over time,” Cate said. “That was not going to be the biggest issue by any means.”
Cate said university officials are looking into alternatives but have not yet decided what those might be — or where they could be built. He said he could not provide an estimate of how much the school had already spent on the project.
The decision to halt the project complicates the university’s goal of boosting on-campus student housing — an ongoing source of tension in the relationship between UVM and the city of Burlington.
City officials have previously expressed concerns that the school’s undergraduate students are occupying too much of the city’s short supply of housing stock, and that UVM’s rising enrollment has contributed to the city’s housing crisis.
A draft agreement, presented to the Burlington City Council in December, would commit the school to increasing on-campus housing if it enrolls more students, but the council has yet to vote on the measure.
Cate said university leaders have not discussed the decision to stop the Catamount Woods project with Burlington council members or with the city’s administration. A spokesperson for Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak did immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon.
Another housing project, Catamount Run, is under construction in South Burlington’s city center. The project’s first phase is expected to open to students in the university’s graduate and professional programs, as well as university employees, this August.
Read the story on VTDigger here: UVM halts plans to build housing near Centennial Woods.