$1M donation allows University of King's College to press on with plans for new residence

A million-dollar gift to the University of King's College has allowed officials at the Halifax-based institution to move ahead with securing design work for a new building that would double student living capacity on campus.

Bill Lahey, the university's president, said the donation came from the family foundation of King's Chancellor Debra Deane Little and her husband Bob Little.

The school is envisaging a building that would go on the site of the current campus gym. It would include 287 new student residence spaces, a new  wellness centre and replacement gym, and space for the university's journalism school.

Lahey said King's has no problem filling its existing 267 student residence beds, but the housing crisis in Halifax and the rest of the province is beginning to affect the university's growth potential.

"We're just at the point where if we can't accommodate more than 267 students, we're going to start losing students because of their difficulty to find off-campus housing."

The university cannot act on a plan to increase student enrollment without more housing options, he said.

The school has launched a request for qualifications from potential design teams. Lahey said they want responses by late January, at which point officials will decide which bids to invite into a request-for-proposals process.

Lahey hopes the university will know who the design team will be before the end of the academic year in May, he said.

The design work will help give a better sense of how much the new building could cost. Along with a fundraising campaign, Lahey has said the project would need assistance from the provincial government and possibly Ottawa.

Although all of the province's universities have talked about the need for more student housing, so far investments from the Nova Scotia government have focused primarily on the provincial community college system.

Provincial student housing strategy overdue

Three student residences announced by the Tories early in their mandate are nearing completion, with a total construction price of $100 million. Last month, the province announced plans for four more Nova Scotia Community College residences, although cost information for those is not ready yet.

Meanwhile, a long-promised student housing strategy from the Tories is months late, and Advanced Education Minister Brian Wong has offered no indication of when or even if that document will be released.

Lahey said the university has kept the province in the loop about its plans.

He acknowledged that it's a challenging environment right now for construction projects because of the availability of funding and skilled labour. But "you never know what you can achieve unless you put out to the world what it is you want to achieve," he said.

"And we'll see what happens from there."