QUINCY, Mass. — Waist-high weeds climb through cracks in the tennis courts. Ivy snakes across the locked-shut entrance of a redbrick former women’s dormitory.
Canada geese graze on the baseball field. Wild turkeys scratch in the underbrush.
Nature is reclaiming what remains of Eastern Nazarene College, which closed last year after its enrollment plummeted and its liabilities ballooned to an unsustainable $18 million.
It’s one among a growing number of closed colleges sitting empty, some for years stretching into decades, as communities fight over what they should become and trustees struggle to pay off creditors.
All of this is happening as the country faces an urgent need for a resource that a mounting number of experts say should be built on abandoned campuses like this one: housing.
Converting closed campuses into badly needed housing is a timely way of using one problem to solve another, these experts say.
Many neighbors think so, too.
“I don’t want to see it wasted,” said Donna Glynn, a teacher who has lived for 50 years across the street from Eastern Nazarene, in this city of about 100,000 just south of Boston. “We could have nice, new, clean housing.”
Efforts to reuse the campus for that purpose have taken so many twists and turns, however, that Glynn choked up as she recounted them. And the former college remains unused.
“Why would you throw this resource away?” she asked, nodding toward the former college.
The United States needs to build about 3.7 million homes to meet demand, according to the mortgage company Freddie Mac. Massachusetts will have to add at least 222,000 by 2035, state officials estimate. Quincy alone is short 4,400 homes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the think tank the American Enterprise Institute found.
Eastern Nazarene seems a perfect place to build some. It’s in a residential neighborhood and close to public transportation. Before it held its last commencement, it reached an agreement to be acquired by a private equity and development company owned by an alumnus who reportedly planned to put more than 600 units of housing on the 27-acre site.
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But Quincy’s mayor said that number of units was too high, and — after the deal fell through — proposed that the city itself buy the campus for about $23 million and redevelop it with fewer homes than the developer proposed. Then the city council rejected that idea in June as too expensive.
The debate has become contentious and political, and no one involved would respond to requests to discuss it — the developer, the mayor, the three city councilors who voted for his plan, the college’s transition board or its real estate attorney.
“It seems an easy case to make” to transform closed college campuses into housing, said Christian Koulichkov, director of real estate brokerage of the financial services company Hilco Global, who noted he was not speaking specifically about Eastern Nazarene or Quincy. “It makes sense just from a need perspective. The one commodity we have too little of in this country is housing, and affordable housing to boot.”
It isn’t easy to transform college campuses into housing. They’re often not zoned for it. Many colleges that have closed weren’t taken care of at the end. Their buildings are old. They don’t meet accessibility standards. Dorms have shared bathrooms and crowded layouts that are hard to reconfigure into fully functional apartments.
Even as the college closing crisis speeds up — with 442 private, nonprofit colleges and universities at risk of closing or having to merge over the next 10 years, according to a new estimate from Huron Consulting Group — few governing boards have planned ahead for the possibility that their institutions might shut down. And communities seldom think it will happen to them, so do little to prepare for handling a suddenly vacant campus.
That’s what Kurt Wheeler, the mayor of Cazenovia, New York, found when 200-year-old Cazenovia College defaulted on $25 million in debt and closed in 2023, leaving an empty collection of land and buildings in the heart of his village.
When officials looked around to see how other places in the same situation were repurposing their closed colleges, “We could not find a successful example, especially in small towns,” said Wheeler. “So we said, ‘We’re going to be the first.’ Because this problem is not going to go away.”
The village conducted a feasibility study and changed the zoning for the property to make it more attractive to developers; a group of local investors then bought up many of the buildings to convert them into a new “town square,” with housing and other uses.
“If we don’t want this really awful outcome of the weeds and the falling-apart buildings, we all have to be a little bit flexible,” Wheeler said.
Many other communities with closed colleges, however, continue to be stuck with weeds and falling-apart buildings.
“Field of weeds,” the local newspaper called the empty campus of Limestone University in South Carolina, which closed last year under $38 million of debt and has been mired in a dispute among its creditors, a lawsuit from former employees seeking back pay and demands from former students for refunds for classes that were never taught.
Virginia Intermont College has sat vacant for 12 years, even after a Chinese company bought it. Four of its buildings burned down in a huge fire in 2024 and the rubble still hasn’t been cleared, while many of the remaining structures have been vandalized.
Redevelopment efforts are sometimes held up by neighbors, who also want a say in what happens to campuses.
“Save our Neighborhood” read red signs on front lawns all around the former Eastern Nazarene. They were put there by opponents of the original high-density development plan.
“I’d love to keep it as it is” — as a quiet and pastoral enclave — said Lauren Hickey, who walks her dog, Charlee, on the campus, shaded by trees so exotic it’s been designated as an arboretum named for a former botany professor.
Related: Pace of college closings picks up, with more projected
Some communities have managed to move ahead with housing on closed college campuses, however.
A developer plans to build 165 homes on the 60-acre former campus of Holy Names University in Oakland, California, which closed in 2023, for instance. A nonprofit is putting dozens of apartments for former foster youth on the campus of the former Dana College near Omaha, which closed in 2010, and has also proposed senior housing there.
Low-cost apartments have been built on a closed branch campus in Denver of Johnson & Wales University. And about 160 units of high-end senior housing have replaced part of the former Newbury College campus near Boston.
Conversions into housing also are proposed for more recently closed college campuses.
Alumni, neighbors and local nonprofit organizations have formed a partnership to build affordable housing in western Massachusetts on the 275-acre former Simon’s Rock campus of Bard College, which the college shed last year. Officials in the community surrounding Trinity Christian College near Chicago, which closed in the spring, are encouraging the organization that bought it to sell off parts of the campus for senior housing.
Related: Business, government and education leaders try to reinvent college from scratch
Senior housing and homes are planned for closed branch campuses of the University of Wisconsin in Fond du Lac and Waukesha. And a nonprofit community trust is negotiating to buy the former Sterling College in Vermont, which closed in the spring, and make it into housing, among other uses.
Many of these aspirations are likely to take patience, said Chris Ales, a real estate developer who is transforming several buildings into housing at Iowa Wesleyan University, which closed in 2023. But “it’s a good solution, despite the challenges. A lot of college campuses are well-suited in their footprint for an adaptive reuse into apartments.”
The kind of senior housing being built on many former campuses, including his, frees up other homes for younger buyers, Ales said. And most of a campus’s original green space remains, “so that is usually a positive for the neighbors” who — as at Eastern Nazarene — are accustomed to enjoying it.
None of this makes the process of replacing colleges with housing any easier, he noted.
Still, Ales said, “I’ve stood before many a city council” that was skeptical about transforming college campuses for that purpose. “And in the end, you get where you need to be. Because it’s common sense.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about using closed colleges for housing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
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