<p>The whole dorms-vs.-off campus issue is delicate and important for the University. I’m sure it’s true that having more, prettier dorms is an element of the university’s marketing to prospective students. And I couldn’t blame a kid for deciding that he liked Harvard’s or Princeton’s housing options (with almost all students living on-campus in university housing) better than Chicago’s. On the other hand, in lots of places universities are trying to get OUT of the business of developing and managing residential real estate, something frankly other institutions tend to do a little more competently, and for which private-sector financing is (was?) readily available. And it wasn’t so long ago that the University was DESPERATE to get developers to invest in Hyde Park. Competing with the people you want to invest usually isn’t the greatest strategy.</p>
<p>In the long run, the University has a huge stake in having the portions of Hyde Park it doesn’t own be clean, prosperous, and student-friendly. Maybe at this point that will happen anyway, even if the University pulls all of its students out of the community and back into dorms (something it’s not even close to, yet). But Hyde Park would be awful today if the University had done that 20 years ago.</p>