There’s no better way to ring in the new school year in Saginaw than the mechanical groans of heavy machinery at eight in the morning. Welcome to SVSU — construction is a permanent resident.
Construction work has taken over SVSU for the past few years. In the 2024-25 school year, the entirety of Brown Hall was shut down for remodeling, forcing departments to relocate their classes to other buildings for the entire school year.
However, I would argue that remodeling an ancient academic building is a respectable construction endeavor. It is necessary to modernize old buildings for the sake of keeping up appearances.
This year’s victim of the construction plague is University Village, which I approve of significantly less.
I’ll explain the thought process: administration decides to build more housing because they admit too many people each year and are scrambling to keep students off of the housing waitlist. If they’re building more dorms, they’re obligated to add some new parking lots as well.
And when is the best time to do those things? Probably during the summer, when the weather is favorable and less students are on campus. This seems like a perfectly reasonable course of action — except it’s SVSU, and they decide to push off the construction they announced back in April until August.
Parking spaces in University Village and Pine Grove are being torn up, paved and painted in a last-minute effort to provide spots for student vehicles this fall. The construction in the west parking lot was supposed to be cleaned up prior to move-in.
Well, it wasn’t, and if you were moving into University Village West(UVW) on August 22 like I was, you probably got first hand experience of circling the lots in a vain attempt to find a spot and eventually parking on the grass (if you didn’t, I envy you). We are now approaching mid-September and there are still plenty of orange cones to go around outside UVW.
In addition to the parking lot fiascos, entire sections of University Village have been fenced off as construction begins on new dorms. I return to my previous point: why not complete the construction during the summer months?
At the very least, construction crews would have had from May until August to at least lay a foundation. It would make sense to have the houses built before the school year. Now, the construction crews are on a time crunch: do they grind out entire buildings before winter arrives and freezes the ground? Or leave the ugly wire fencing up until spring?
Ground wasn’t even broken on move-in day for University Village, instead, it began just as classes started. If you were hoping for a scenic backyard, think again; the construction crews will be installing a beautiful septic tank just for your viewing experience! Want to sleep in on your day off? Too bad, you’re getting AC/DC on full volume at sunrise (I will say, AC/DC is a stellar music choice).
To summarize, SVSU is a disorganized mess when it comes to their title as the best campus in the state. We are paying thousands of dollars for the #1 housing in Michigan, yet the facade collapses in on itself when you take a stroll through the village and find excavating equipment and swarms of construction workers taking their time to complete the projects that should already be further along in the process.
The construction may not have been avoidable during the school year, but SVSU should have at least compensated those living in areas affected by the construction with discounted housing rates for the year.
There isn’t much else to do other than hope that next time, SVSU might be a little more student-oriented in their construction chaos.
