Incoming high rise will contrast with current apartments, residents say

Residents of apartments due for destruction next summer say the luxury high rise replacing them wouldn’t necessarily fit their budget.

“If you want to live anywhere near this area, it’s $800 to over a grand,” said Madie Zoeller, an incoming senior in nursing and a resident of one of the apartments.

The five buildings are on the 200 block of W. Wood Street, which intersects with S. Chauncey Avenue near the Chauncey Hill mall and Raising Cane’s. The land the buildings occupy was rezoned last month for a 13-story high rise developers and city representatives say will ease the housing shortage near campus.

“That’s why we moved here,” Tyler Merrill, another resident, said, speaking for he and his roommates. “It’s like the closest you can get to campus without paying $1,000.”

Residents interviewed in four apartments said they paid $615 to $800 a month to property management company Evergreen Campus Rentals, with those who had been living there longer seeing smaller hikes in rent.

Zoeller said she chose to move into the apartment her junior year after living in university housing, in part because she likes to cook and her new place had a kitchen. She said that last fall she and her roommates were mulling a switch to Granite Student Living apartments, “one of the few affordable in the area,” she said.

But the line scared them away.

As previously reported by The Exponent, students camped out for up to 16 hours last fall in hopes of securing a lease from Granite. Some, who arrived near the end of the block-long throng, were turned away.

“I honestly thought about camping out with everybody,” Zoeller said. “But by the time I knew that everybody was camping out, I just assumed there were already too many people.”

Rent projections for the 13-story-high rise replacing the Evergreen apartments have not been released. Developers say it will have “double the study space per bed of any project in West Lafayette.”

Mia Iwasa, an incoming senior and Evergreen resident, said her apartment could use an upgrade.

“I don’t really mind it because this apartment has a lot of problems just because it’s so old,” she said. “They fix things, but we have a lot of maintenance problems and mold problems.”

Zoeller said she was happy that she didn’t have to take out student loans for housing, and that she felt fortunate to find something under $700.

“If they could actually build something that’s affordable, that would be great,” she said. “But if it’s just gonna be another Hub,” she trailed off, referencing the State Street building with studio apartments priced over $1,000.

“I feel like everyone has trouble with housing,” Zoeller said. “I feel like it’s a pretty universal problem.”