WEST LEBANON — When Dartmouth President Sian Beilock came to the college in 2023, she announced a goal to build 1,000 housing units for college students, faculty and staff in 10 years.
Since then, Dartmouth has announced renovations to several dorms, unveiled plans for four new dorms to be built over the next several years and cut the ribbon Tuesday on a 21-home complex for college employees in West Lebanon.
With all of the projects under construction, Dartmouth College is on track to have more than 700 new housing units open by 2029, Josh Keniston, vice president for operations at Dartmouth, said in an interview at the complex Tuesday.
“We hear stories every year of faculty and staff that we recruited but didn’t successfully get because they couldn’t find housing for their family,” Keniston said. “I think bringing these units online is really about making sure that we can recruit the best and the brightest, because that’s part of what makes Dartmouth great.”
The 21-unit housing complex called Sugarwood Circle includes a mix of one- and two-story single-family homes and duplexes that were built off-site by East Montpelier, Vt.-based modular home company Huntington Homes.
Eight of the buildings off of Oak Ridge Road across Route 10 from Dartmouth-owned Sachem Village are available for lease for tenants to move in in March with a waiting list already growing. Two more are under construction and 11 of the houses have yet to be delivered. The whole complex is expected to be complete by the end of the summer, Keniston said Tuesday.
The complex is targeted toward families and “people that are settling in here for the long term,” Keniston said. “…I think collectively any new unit we can provide relieves some pressure on the market.”
As of 2023, the New Hampshire side of the Upper Valley needed more than 4,000 new housing units by 2030 to meet regional demand, including 850 in Lebanon and 530 in Hanover, according to a study from the Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission.
“When I think about all the entities working together, the speed, efficiency, with which this was accomplished — a three-week build off site, and then the seamless handoff to the work done here on site — it speaks exactly to the kind of urgency and collaboration we need right now,” Beilock said Tuesday.
Dartmouth announced that it would finance the $15.2 million project in partnership with West Lebanon-based developer and Dartmouth graduate Jeff Shapiro last February. The investment revitalized what would have been a private development Shapiro first proposed to the Lebanon Planning Board in 2019.
Most of the units at Sugarwood Circle are two story, three-bedroom homes with a small porch, three-and-a-half bathrooms, and an open living room and kitchen area. The modern modular properties are neatly arranged along a newly constructed road with most sharing a driveway and detached two-car garage with a neighbor.
The two-story homes will cost $4,400 a month, while rent for one accessible single-family one-story home and three duplexes have yet to be determined, according to the college’s rental website.
Rent will be deducted from employee payroll. Water, sewer, landscaping, lawn mowing and road snow removal are included in rent, but tenants are responsible for heat, hot water, electricity, trash and driveway snow removal.
The college is thinking about its housing plans in “phases,” Keniston said. While the Sugarwood Circle complex is geared towards long-term staff housing, the units will not be for sale.
“When we look at all of the housing we have available, we need to have enough rental housing before we can start thinking about building for-sale type of things,” Keniston said. ”But we know that our employees want to buy … So we are looking at how do we eventually put that into the mix.”