Tech's on-campus housing options will increase next year with the acquisition of the apartments of Georgia State University Village, originally built to house athletes participating in the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.

The University System of Georgia made the announcement on March 7 that usage of the buildings and property, owned by the Board of Regents, will be transferred from Georgia State to Tech effective July 1. Housing is tentatively referring to the residences as North Avenue Apartments.

The move will allow more students to move up to apartment-style residences while ensuring that all current on-campus residents should have a space available to them in the fall, eliminating the waiting lists and overcrowding issues that have plagued Housing in recent years.

"We have great plans for this site," said Rosalind R. Meyers, associate vice president of Auxiliary Services.

"It will enlarge the Georgia Tech residential community, expand student options, increase the number of students who will be able to get apartments, and make Georgia Tech an even better place for students to live," Meyers said.

This fall Georgia State will open its new 4.2 acre University Commons, located much closer to its downtown campus than the University Village, permitting the latter to be transferred to Tech. This will make the commute between GSU student housing and its campus shorter.

The sudden announcement after the original deadline to apply for on-campus housing for next year will likely cause many students to re-evaluate their plans. Housing has extended that deadline to Monday, March 12 at 5 p.m., and the time frame to enter room choices will be March 14 until March 20 at 5 p.m.

The apartments are located on North Avenue between the Downtown Connector and Centennial Olympic Park Drive, and are comprised of four residence halls that house a total of 2000 students in four- and six-person apartments. Two of the buildings will be open in the fall, housing 1000 students, and the remainder will open in the fall of 2008.

Apart from the apartment-style residences, in which residents live together with individual bedrooms and share a kitchen and a bathroom, Tech offers two other types of on-campus residences.

Suite-style residences house two residents to a bedroom, with pairs of rooms separated by bathrooms that are shared by the four residents.

Traditional-style residences, in which two students share a bedroom but rely on community bathrooms, are where all incoming freshmen participating in the Freshmen Experience program are assigned as well as a small number of non-freshman undergraduates.

Now, that number will be considerably smaller with Fulmer, a female dorm, remaining open for that purpose; of the others, Field, Hanson, Hopkins, Matheson and Perry Halls will be closing and Armstrong will become a freshman dorm.

The result will be that the majority of sophomores will be assigned to apartments, according to Housing, whereas in the past most sophomores lived in suite- and traditional-style rooms. However, some will continue to fill the suite-style Woodruff and Harris Halls.

All juniors and seniors living on-campus who enter a preference to live in the apartments will be assigned to them.

The cost of living in the new apartments will remain the same as the current cost of living in apartment-style housing on campus, at $3,042 per semester, and the interior layout and accommodations of the apartments are very similar to those of the existing on-campus apartments.

The Department of Housing has scheduled two informational meetings for students and parents to learn more about how they are affected. The first will be Monday, March 12 at 7 p.m. in Brittain Recreational Center; the second will be Thursday, March 15 at 8 p.m. in the Eighth Street Apartments Activity Room.