Temple Plots Residential Hall to Rein in Off-Campus Sprawl

Temple University is gearing up for a housing reset in North Philadelphia.

The school plans to seek developer proposals for a ground-up dorm near Broad and Norris streets, Bisnow reported. President John Fry said the move is essential to modernizing the university’s dated housing stock and reshaping its North Philly footprint. It also helps the institution pull students back to campus and cool years of neighborhood friction.

The project is still light on details, but Fry told attendees at a NAIOP Greater Philadelphia event that an RFP is coming in the next few months. The goal is to build enough beds to use the property as swing space, then gut-renovating two existing residence halls to ultimately assemble what Fry called a “super block of housing.”

It’s an early salvo from a president who has been on the job just a year but is signaling that Temple will take a more aggressive role in its real estate strategy.

Fry didn’t elaborate on the development plan but made it clear he wants North Broad to be an area of Temple-anchored projects, not the hodgepodge of off-campus rentals that have defined the student experience.

Years of laissez-faire housing policy left students scattered across low-rise blocks, fueling tension with longtime residents who have endured late-night parties, trash issues and the occasional overturned car.

“We just didn’t invest in our own housing stock,” Fry said, which created “chaos everywhere.”

Reining in that chaos is also part of a larger geographic ambition. Fry is pitching North Broad as the third leg of Philadelphia’s “research triangle,” hoping to knit together the main campus, Temple Health’s footprint farther north and the recently acquired Terra Hall on South Broad Street.

Fry is leaning on his experience to shepherd these projects. At Penn and Drexel, he helped steer public-private partnerships and investments. North Philadelphia, he warned, presents a steeper climb due to decades of disinvestment, weaker institutional density and community concerns that Temple has historically struggled to address.

— Holden Walter-Warner