New Haven Connecticut, well known as the home of prestigious Ivy League Yale University, hopes to shore up part of its sagging downtown with a college of a very different stripe. Construction has recently been started on a long planned consolidation and expansion of its community college costing over $200M.
Known as Gateway Community College, it will be occupying land which recently held a vacant department store and dead downtown mall. The campus will initially be composed of 2 buildings facing each other across a major downtown street. It will anchor the south end of the city’s downtown business center where it is hoped it will draw activity and development down from the north end which is anchored by Yale. The new campus will combine the current 2 remote campuses into one and will include a theater, ground floor retail, community spaces, housing, offices, and parking. Planners note that the combined campus will provide state of the art facilities for as many as 11,000 to 14,000 students and over 600 college staff.
College planners believe the new campus will reduce operating costs, will make it easier for students to take advantage of college course offerings, will be more convenient to get to because of its central location as well as plentiful nearby public transit. The consolidation and move to a downtown location was partly inspired by the highly successful move of Capital Community College to downtown Hartford where it was located within a renovated historic departments store in the 1990s. Capital’s school literature notes the following: “Downtown Hartford is now an extended campus for thousands of students of all ages. Capital, centrally located and more accessible to residents, continues to educate a multicultural community of learners in an urban center of business, culture and government. From our prime location, students can take advantage of a wealth of cultural and employment opportunities, all within walking distance of the College . History, the arts, government and business, are integrated into the educational experience, with classes and internships that make the most of being in the center of the city.”
Erie County has plans in the works to maintain and shore up its 3 campus community college system with a proposed (but currently stalled) $30,000,000 investment at its Amherst campus. ECC is the area’s second largest college and the fourth largest community college in NYS with approximately 12,000 to 15,000 students (depending on source). The city college currently has the smallest enrollment at about 23% of the total. the Amherst campus is the largest with approximately 45% of the student population. The most recent expansion of the City Campus was by a private developer who added student housing in the nearby renovated Alling and Cory building. Plans were floated for a consolidated City Campus in downtown Buffalo several years ago which were shelved when the new county administration took office. There are no major projects planned for downtown ECC expansion that I know of.