Temple Seeks Developer To Build New Residence Hall Near Broad And Norris

Temple University President John Fry is eager to house more students on campus, so the school is plotting a new North Philadelphia residence hall.

While the size and exact location of the building haven't been announced, Fry said Temple plans to issue a request for proposals regarding the project near Broad and Norris streets in the coming months.

“That will allow us, after that’s completed, to use that as swing space to take two of our residences and do a full renovation,” he said Monday during a NAIOP Greater Philadelphia event. “That should create a super block of housing.”

Fry declined Bisnow’s request for more details about the plan, but he was eager to have CRE players support his work to transform North Broad Street into the third corner of Philadelphia’s “research triangle” alongside University City and the Navy Yard.

But he doesn’t want that investment funneled into the low-rise, off-campus housing that has defined the Temple student experience in recent years.

“We just didn’t invest in our own housing stock,” Fry said. “We allowed students to live anywhere they wanted to with chaos everywhere.”

The odd hours college students keep and their sometimes-spotty stewardship of rental properties led to tension with longstanding North Philly community members, who have weathered raucous late night parties, overturned cars and more.

“Temple has to do its part to house more first- and second-year students … We have plenty of space to do so,” Fry said. 

“If you’re going to be invested in North Philadelphia, let’s also think about those neighborhoods,” he added.

Another priority for Fry is connecting the main campus near Cecil B. Moore Avenue to Terra Hall on South Broad Street, a former University of the Arts property purchased for $18M in February, and the Temple Health hub farther north on the corridor.

But he doesn’t think the North Philadelphia Amtrak station that lies roughly halfway between the main campus and the hospital will serve as an anchor for that development in the short term, even though he would like to see more service there.

“It sits on a site that’s very constrained,” Fry said. “There’s just not enough land at this point for large-scale developments.”

While the president has only been at Temple for about a year, he has three decades of experience in Pennsylvania higher education, including stints at Franklin & Marshall College, Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Fry believes the public-private partnerships he helped coordinate during his time in West Philly could serve as a model for Temple’s community work in North Philly.

When Fry started at Penn in 1995, he said the school’s reputation was suffering due to West Philly’s crime woes.

He said the University City District founded in 1997 helped put a broad array of stakeholders in the neighborhood on the same page about topics like public safety, housing and K-12 public schools.

Fry believes a similar playbook could work in North Philly, but he said the decades of disinvestment there and lack of complementary anchor institutions are major roadblocks for Temple.

“I think it makes our challenges in North Philadelphia more profound than the challenges we had in West Philadelphia,” he said.