Abstract
Real estate development has grown increasingly difficult to plan, finance, and execute across the United States. Rising construction costs, tightening lending conditions, complex regulatory environments, and heightened community scrutiny have made even straightforward projects demanding undertakings. These pressures are felt most acutely in university towns, where development occurs at the intersection of competing interests: long-term residents seeking affordability and stability, institutions pursuing growth and prestige, municipal governments balancing fiscal constraints with housing demand, and student populations that fundamentally reshape local markets. The result is an environment where the technical challenges of building are compounded by political, economic, and social forces that are often difficult to align. University towns must simultaneously accommodate institutional expansion while addressing chronic shortages of housing affordable to the non-student workforce that sustains them. Failing to manage either dimension has real consequences: poorly executed campus construction disrupts the communities around it, while neglected housing markets push essential workers further from the institutions they serve. The two projects comprising this thesis engage both sides of that challenge. One examines the constructibility and logistical complexity of a major institutional expansion at the University of Virginia. The other investigates why some university towns succeed at producing affordable housing while others do not. Together, they reflect a broader truth about development in these environments, that technical competence and policy alignment are equally necessary, and rarely sufficient on their own.
The McIntire School of Commerce expansion at the University of Virginia presented a uniquely complex construction management challenge: simultaneously renovating the historic Cobb Hall and constructing the modern Shumway Hall addition in an active academic campus environment. The primary rationale for this project was to develop a comprehensive execution plan that addressed the significant constructibility and logistical hurdles inherent to the site. Our team approached this by tackling five core deliverables: a support of excavation design for the Cobb Hall renovation, a tunnel connection phasing plan linking the two buildings, a full site logistics plan, a concrete scope estimate with labor analysis, and a risk register with mitigation strategies for identified project threats. The results of this work produced a cohesive, construction-ready framework that sequenced operations to minimize campus disruption while maintaining structural integrity across both buildings. What distinguishes this capstone from more conventional technical projects is its emphasis on constructibility analysis and logistical coordination rather than purely design or cost outcomes, reflecting the realities that define project success in constrained, occupied environments.
The STS paper investigates how the development of non-student affordable housing in university towns is shaped by the interplay of political, economic, and social forces. Using a comparative case study framework, the research examines four archetypal college towns (Charlottesville, VA; Chapel Hill, NC; Ann Arbor, MI; and Athens, GA) to identify the conditions under which affordable housing development succeeds or stalls. Each case was analyzed first for its broader housing market dynamics, then for the specific strategies local governments and institutions have employed to address affordability. The central argument is that cities which successfully produce affordable housing do so by aligning incentives across stakeholders and systematically reducing friction in development processes - through mechanisms such as reliable funding pipelines, proactive zoning reform, and meaningful university-municipal collaboration. Where these elements are fragmented or politically contested, housing production consistently underperforms. The Social Construction of Technology framework was also used to examine the development of affordable housing through a social lens. The paper concludes that no single policy lever is sufficient, rather affordability requires coordinated institutional action that treats the university as a potential partner in solving the problem it helps create.
