Fresno State cut the ribbon on its new on-campus housing complex on Tuesday, unveiling 80,000 square feet of one to four bedroom apartment-style units, a small gym, rec room and meeting space. The new space also includes six family units, for students with children.

It now has 1,598 beds on a campus with more than 24,000 students, which is an issue university leadership will continue to address in the future. But for the first time, Phong Yang, the university’s vice president of student affairs and enrollment management, said there are no students on a waiting list to live in campus housing.

There are 1,598 available beds, and 1,598 students in them.

So, how did the university determine who would live in the dorm spaces that have been around for more than 50 years, and who would live in the brand-new housing units? Lottery? Cage match? Donation to the athletics department?

“We allowed our returners to come into this building first,” Erin Boele, director of student housing, said. “They were able to select from any of our locations. After that, our family housing got priority into those six spaces, and then some of our freshmen were able to join this building since our returners did not take it all.”

Boele said there were 620 students returning to campus housing this fall semester and about 150 chose to move into the new building. The others chose to remain in existing dorms on campus at Baker, Birch, Cedar, Graves, Homan, Ponderosa, Sequoia, Sycamore and Aspen halls

“A lot of our returners wanted to stay in the traditional style halls,” Boele said. “Every student is looking for something different. Some of them like the traditional (experience). They like to be able to go into the dining hall and eat their meals every day.

“This one is an apartment, so you can cook for yourself. You don’t have to be on a meal plan. They chose based on what their preferences were.”

Fresno State president Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval targeted additional affordable housing on a campus where roughly 65% of students are the first in their families to attend college, while housing costs in the Valley spiked following the COVID-19 pandemic. The California State University board of trustees approved the design of the four-story building in July 2023, and $54 million in funding that includes an affordable student housing grant from the state.

“For many of our students affordable housing is not a convenience, it’s what makes college possible and today, this is going to be fundamental to their future,” Jiménez-Sandoval said.

“Affordable housing helps remove one of the barriers between our students and their degrees, and when our students earn their degrees, the impact is felt far beyond this campus. It strengthens families. It grows our workplace, lifts neighborhoods, fuels the economy of our Central Valley.”