Austen Hunzeker
News Editor
Idaho State University hopes to address the shortage of student housing amid enrollment growth by building a 350-bed apartment-style student housing complex in the near future.
On Dec. 17, university officials will meet with the Idaho State Board of Education to seek approval to release a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) and, ideally, to enter into a public-private partnership with local private developers to build the complex for the university.
“We will own the land, and essentially they will own and run the building,” said ISU Vice President of Student Affairs Craig Chatriand. “Working with developers who know this world incredibly well is going to make it faster, higher quality, and… it’s going to help the university from a financial standpoint not put [the project] on our debt load.”
If the university is approved, it will release the RFQ in January. In mid-March, the university will release a Request for Proposals (RFP). The university will ideally finish reviewing the submissions by the end of May, at which point it will enter the pre-development agreement negotiation stage, complete a contract with the winning proposal, and submit it to the State Board of Education for approval at the August 2026 meeting.
The chosen private developer will draft the complex’s location and an architectural rendering. Construction will ideally begin in the fall of 2026.
“Our buildings that we have on campus right now are all fairly aged,” Chatriand said. “After we get this built, we are also working on a more comprehensive renovation plan [for] our existing places, like Schubert, McIntosh, Pulling…So at the back end of this, we want to update all of our current facilities.”
A student survey was completed in September to gather information on what students would like to see in new student housing.
“Of the respondents to that survey, 25% said they currently live off campus because there wasn’t room available for them on campus, or they weren’t able to live in the type of unit that they wanted,” Chatriand said.
Some students have reported to The Bengal Newspaper issues in re-securing housing for the 2025-2026 school year. This was the case for junior psychology and social work major Chloe Roberts.
“I was under the impression [that the] honors program had priority for housing and Rendezvous as well, as it was me going into my third year, I also figured I would have priority,” Roberts said. “So I hadn’t applied once it opened immediately because I didn’t think that I needed to.”
Roberts and her roommate were put on a waitlist, and after attending a meeting with housing officials in February, were informed that the likelihood of her securing housing was close to zero.
“That’s when we learned, or at least when I learned, that freshmen now had priority for housing,” Roberts said. “They mentioned a priority deadline in one email at the bottom of the housing email, I think it was back in October [2024] that they sent that. And when you are a returning resident, I am not going to read through the emails about reapplying for housing, because I know how to reapply, and there was no indication that there had been any change in the email. So I mean, I probably skimmed it.”
Roberts now lives off campus. According to Chatriand, two challenges the university currently faces are offering affordable on-campus housing and full residence halls due to enrollment growth. With waitlists filled with up to 400 people for the past several years, returning students have been limited to accommodate first-year students.
“What we had to do last year is, at a certain point, we had to say, ‘All right, if you don’t sign up to live in the residence halls again next year, you’re not going to be able to [and] we’re going to take that space and reserve that for an incoming student,” Chatriand said. “We communicated this very thoroughly, many times, in many different ways to our residence hall population. Some students were still caught off guard by it, because it’s a change in our practice.”
The university’s campus master plan, approved in December 2024, calls for expanding student housing and renovating existing housing. According to Chatriand, if enrollment growth continues, more student housing projects may follow.
“This building is one phase of moving forward with an expansion in modernization of campus housing,” Chatriand said.
To view the campus master plan, visit www.isu.edu/campusplan/.
