DENVER – CU Denver officials have approved funding for the first student dorm at the downtown campus.
The University of Colorado Board of Regents met Thursday and approved $68 million for the project, which would provide enough housing for more than 500 students and sit at the corner of 11th and Larimer streets.
The dorm, which would be more than 167,000 square feet and also have a dining facility, is expected to be finished by fall 2021, according to CU Denver. CU shares the Auraria Campus area with Metropolitan State University and the Community College of Denver.
The dorm project comes as CU Denver, mostly a commuter school, has seen its number of non-resident students nearly double over the last decade, from 783 in 2009 to 1,545 in 2018, according to the university's first-year student housing program plan released this year.
The plan said a 2017 survey showed a demand of 563 on-campus beds, in addition to the 722 already available at the Campus Village Apartments, which were built by a private developer on the western edge of the campus, the university said. That demand would grow to more than 1,000 on-campus beds if the university hits its future enrollment targets.