Gilbane Debuts Student Housing Community at Maryland HBCU

Gilbane Building Co., in partnership with WarrenBuilds, has completed the construction of Legacy Hall, a 604-bed student residential tower at Morgan State University’s campus in Baltimore.

Morgan State University partnered with the Maryland Economic Development Corporation, or MEDCO, through an alternative delivery model to finance, design, construct and operate the 167,000-square-foot residence hall. The property was a response to the campus’s critical need for more beds, Gilbane said in a statement.

Gilbane and WarrenBuilds acted as the construction manager at risk with HDC acting as the owner’s representative. Designed by Hord Coplan Macht and Moody Nolan, the tower features a concrete structural frame, brick and window wall veneer, a mix of semi-suites and apartment-style housing and communal lounges.

The hall was part of a project that took 21 months to complete and included the construction of the Thurgood Marshall Hall Student Housing and Dining Facility and a practice field to replace the original Thurgood Marshall apartment community.

Gilbane has been generally active in Maryland housing this year. This is one of many projects between Gilbane Building Company and WarrenBuilds since the firms entered a form mentor-protégé relationship in 2019. The partnership recently delivered six new Prince George’s County Public Schools schools and are expanding and renovating Prince George’s Community College’s Marlboro Hall and the Maryland Stadium Authority’s Orioles Park at Camden Yards and Prince George’s Stadium.

Student housing in demand

Purdue University Fort Wayne recently entered a public-private partnership with Gilbane to develop a 600-bed student housing community at the institution’s North Campus in Fort Wayne, Ind. The project, financed through a private nonprofit foundation, will cost between $90 and $100 million. The community is expected to come online in 2026 and is part of the university’s initiative to add more on-campus student housing.

The 213,000-square-foot property will comprise 176 units, ranging from studio to four-bedroom floorplans. The project is expected to break ground in October.

Baltimore’s market-rate apartment sector began 2024 on a sluggish note, with rents in line with U.S. figures, down 0.2 percent on a trailing three-month basis through January. This marked the fifth consecutive month of contractions. Year-over-year figures followed a similar path, with the metro’s rate up 0.6 percent as of January, to $1,673, just 10 basis points ahead of the U.S. average.

Meanwhile, supply rose in 2023, putting some pressure on occupancy in stabilized assets, which slid 60 basis points in 12 months to 94.5 percent in January.