Eagle View Village, a faculty housing complex built behind West Lake Village, is being constructed to make FGCU a preferred employer for future faculty and staff. However, the university\u2019s goal to align itself with its future employees is instead affecting the current student body.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember when [construction] first started, and I was woken up at 5 a.m. to it, and it was just loud, clanking and building sounds,\u201d senior Zoe Duncombe said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Phase one of Eagle View Village broke ground on Nov. 27, 2025, with physical construction activity starting over the last few weeks. The first portion of the project encompasses 74 units of detached one and two-bedroom cottages and two to three townhomes split between 44 buildings. These homes will be priced 20% below market price.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe tangential benefit to students will be the recruitment of more quality faculty and staff that may historically turn down employment offers because of the cost of living in [Southwest Florida],\u201d FGCU Housing Services said in an email.<\/p>\n
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For many students, the construction phase couldn\u2019t be more disruptive, as noise and traffic to and from the site have caused issues for students at all hours of the day.<\/p>\n
\u201c[West Lake Village housing staff] said that they had no control over [the noise], but they\u2019ve been getting a lot of calls, and they all definitely felt for the students, and they were telling me to go and file a report,\u201d junior Renee Hoague said.<\/p>\n
\u201cA piece of scrap metal or wood hit our window. I only wonder how much damage has probably happened to people\u2019s cars that are in the lot right next to it,\u201d Duncombe said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While current residents are dealing with disruptions caused by the construction site, future residents will live alongside the faculty and staff in Eagle View Village during the first set of move-ins in January 2027.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it would feel kind of like you\u2019re being washed over by your teachers, like in high school again,\u201d Hoague said. \u201cI just don\u2019t think it\u2019s very appropriate, especially if they\u2019re having their families live here, and then their families are living with college kids. I just don\u2019t think that\u2019s a good idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phase one of the project is still on track to be completed in December 2026. The start date for phase two of the project is undetermined, with the flexibility to build housing in future phases varying based on demand.<\/p>\n
\u201cI firmly believed that [housing] should have been mainly for students, because housing at FGCU has always been an issue,\u201d Duncombe said. \u201cI\u2019m not sure how to deal with the issue of housing in general for Southwest Florida, because that\u2019s, I feel like a bigger problem than FGCU can handle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eagle View Village, a faculty housing complex built behind West Lake Village, is being constructed to make FGCU…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-231335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}