Pittsburgh Planning Commission approves new residence hall on Pitt campus
PITTSBURGH —
Plans to expand student housing at the University of Pittsburgh will move forward.
This week, the City of Pittsburgh Planning Commission gave approval to a 9-story, first-year residence hall with a ground-floor restaurant at Fifth Avenue and Ruskin Avenue in North Oakland.
As shown in renderings from PJ Dick, VMDO, and Kimmel Architecture, the L-shaped building will wrap around the Music Building and will neighbor Ruskin Hall.
“It’s definitely necessary because they’ve admitted a lot more first-year students,” said Ryan Berger, a rising senior at Pitt.
The need for more housing at Pitt has been a recent topic of conversation after the university leased a nearby Hampton Inn last school year.
“It seemed like, for such a big school, not having a place to put people seems like, at least to me, like an obvious problem that you’d be able to solve quickly,” Chuck Banks said.
Banks, a rising senior at Pitt, was one of the hundreds of students who stayed in the hotel when he transferred to Pitt his junior year.
“Definitely a longer walk. Not really involved in campus as much because that’s away from all the main stuff. So, a little more on my own, I’d say, than being in an on-campus housing,” Banks said of the experience.
The university said it will not use the Hampton Inn this upcoming school year.
With the addition of 420 beds, Pitt officials said the new residence hall will help reach the goal of enrolling 22,000 undergraduate students on the Pittsburgh campus by 2028.
“I hope that with this housing and other housing they have planned for the future, we will be able to get more kids into actual university housing,” Banks said.
According to the university, the target completion date for the building is fall 2028.
It will be the first new residence hall at Pitt since Nordenberg Hall opened in 2013. The project is awaiting zoning approval from the city.