With a record enrollment of over 9,000 students and continued dramatic growth, Morgan State University is facing a critical housing shortage. On-campus and near-campus housing opportunities are severely limited – so much so that 465 MSU students had to live at the Lord Baltimore Hotel for the 2022-2023 academic year, needing to take a 20-minute shuttle to and from campus. Decades of underfunding at the state and federal level coupled with limited endowments have resulted in constrained or substandard student housing for HBCUs across the country. Beyond the detrimental impact to campus life and extra-curricular opportunities for affected students, this lack of housing is also hamstringing the growth of the university. “The brand of the institution has caught fire. We could easily get 12,000 to 15,000 students in total if we had the residential facilities to house them,” said Dr. David Wilson, President of Morgan State.
MCB Real Estate, a national real estate development firm founded and led by Baltimore-native P. David Bramble, is in the process of transforming a previously vacant 3.3 acre property into a 151-unit, 472-bed student housing building for MSU. The building will sit just half a mile from campus and offer multiple study rooms, a state-of-the-art fitness center, a theater, a game room, and a landscaped courtyard with recreational areas. Beyond these amenities, students will benefit from Morgan State providing Residential Life services on site as well as a shuttle service between the apartments and campus.
NIIF was proud to make its first equity investment of $1 million into this critical project, backing a local developer working to benefit one of Baltimore’s oldest institutions and one of the nation’s top HBCUs.