Updated 5 p.m. Feb. 21 following approval by the Penn State Board of Trustees.
The Penn State Board of Trustees on Friday approved a $92.1 million project that will kick off a multi-phase renovation of Pollock Halls at University Park.
Renovations to Ritner and Wolf halls are slated to begin in May and be completed in July 2026, to Tom Rodgers, interim associate vice president of facilities management and planning, told the board’s Committee on Finance and Investment on Thursday, when it recommended approval.
Ritner and Wolf are the first two of Pollock Halls’ nine 1960s-era dormitories to be renovated in the coming years. The project is part of a renewal plan developed in 2014 for East and Pollock halls, with East Halls work representing phases 1 and 2 completed between 2016 and 2024 (with a two-year COVID interruption in between).
“The plan addresses critical building needs to meet today’s students’ expectations and focuses on cost effectiveness and long-term operational impacts,” Rodgers told the committee on Thursday. “East Halls has now been fully renovated and occupied with positive feedback, both received from the faculty and the staff and the students in those areas.”
Pollock Halls is home to about 2,700 beds, about 20% of the University Park housing inventory.
The Ritner and Wolf renovations are Phase 3A of the East-Pollock plan and will be the first full-building housing renewal in the university’s 2023-28 Capital Plan.
“As with previous renovations, student engagement and feedback have been utilized to evaluate and improve our approach to meeting the needs and the expectations of today’s students,” Rodgers said. “With that in mind the upper floors will be organized with a study room and shared private bathrooms in the center of the plan with double rooms around the perimeter.”
The main entrances, featuring new canopies, will “enhance building accessibility for ease of move-in, move-out, and encourage social interaction at the center ground floor,” Rodgers said.
Large ground floor windows will provide a welcoming atmosphere and natural light into shared common spaces, Rodgers added.
“Exterior walls will be covered with insulation and terracotta cladding addressing facade issues and providing better thermal performance and improve student comfort,” he said.
Inefficient building systems that have reached the end of their useful life will be replaced, and the buildings will be connected to the campus chilled water system to provide climate-controlled living spaces.
“The team has designed a comprehensive landscape strategy for the entire complex aimed at improving move-in-move-out, emergency vehicle access, accessible circulation and landscaping,” Rodgers explained. “The site work associated with 3A will also include traffic and parking changes to enhance safety and improve pedestrian movement throughout the complex.”
Project planners considered two alternatives to full building renovations but ultimately decided against both.
Demolition and replacement with new buildings was not pursued for several reasons. The existing concrete structure and block interior walls are highly durable and lead to lower maintenance costs and impacts on residents if repairs are needed. Using those components in new construction would be cost- and labor-prohibitive, and would create scheduling challenges, Rodgers said.
“For example, the frequency and cost of wall repairs is significantly lower with block walls compared to drywall interiors if there’s water issues with sprinkler discharges,” he explained. “They are so much better contained with the interior block walls as opposed to drywall and displace students for a shorter period of time.”
He added that zoning limitations would require a larger building footprint to retain the same number of beds, and that existing buildings need to be abated whether they are being renovated or replaced. Abatement combined with demolition costs would add up to $10,000 per bed for replacement.
New construction also would extend each phase by 18 to 24 months.
A public-private partnership — like the one planned for a new complex near the corner of University Drive and East College Avenue —was rejected because Pollock Halls is largely occupied by first-year students, requiring university Residence Life services, and because of the interconnectivity of campus utilities in the heart of campus, Rodgers said.
Board Vice-Chair Richard Sokolov said he supported the renovation plan for the first phase, but asked university planning officials not to rule out alternatives for future phases of the Pollock project.
“I just want to encourage us to be fully evaluating all the other options as we go forward on the remaining buildings and just not get locked into a potential renovation, because we have a lot of land here and we have the ability, potentially, to do this more efficiently and effectively building new rather than renovating existing,” Sokolov said. “So I’m OK with this, but going forward, I just want to make sure that we explore that before we get too far down the road.”
Responding to questions from Trustee Kelley Lynch, Rodgers said the university is revamping its process for contingencies to pull back the funds for greater control as a project progresses, and that it uses early ordering and Penn State’s buying power to combat inflation costs.
“We’re working on a lot of projects, especially around the electrical switchgear and different things like that. Sometimes those are two, three years out and we have to get in front of those orders and get those steel packages in early to be able to save as much cost as we possibly can,” Rodgers said. “But we do use the weight of Penn State and our buying power to be able to drive those costs down to put pressure on our vendors. We do that through the purchasing process in many different ways.”
Of the $92.1 million for phase 3A, $71.4 million will come from self-supported borrowing by Housing and Food Services, $14.5 million from HFS reserves and the remainder from program savings, utilities and wireless funds.
Trustee Barry Fenchak was the sole dissenting vote at the board’s meeting on Friday. During the Thursday committee meeting he questioned the cost compared to some comparable projects at peer institutions that were included in a presentation.
“We do have a duty to address that,” Fenchak said. “I think, ideally, we should have been addressing that for some time, or years before we’ve invested, probably at some point, close to half a billion dollars in similar projects that are all priced significantly higher than many of our peers.”
A final land development plan for the project was reviewed by State College Planning Commission in early January.
Four future phases of the Pollock Halls project are expected to take place through 2030, university representatives told the planning commission during a preliminary plan review in September. Each phase will come to the board for approval before moving forward.
Onward State’s Joe Lister contributed to this report.
