Gongol.com Archives: February 2025

February 7, 2025

The University of Northern Iowa has announced its intentions to tear down Campbell Hall, a residence hall that has stood for seven decades. The dormitory "has $27 million worth of deferred maintenance" and only housed about 600 students. $45,000 per bed seems like a fairly high price to pay for a renovation, especially when compared with a median price of $148,000 per room to construct a brand-new hotel. There are probably some important differences in cost between the two types of construction, but assuming that each room could house two students, the cost to renovate clearly ran into the same zone as the cost of new construction. ■ For further comparison, the university built an entirely new apartment-style residence hall in 2011-12 for around $20 million, for about $100,000 a room. Construction costs have inflated quite a lot since that time, but certainly not by double -- perhaps by 60% to 70%. And at the end of the day, even a renovated building is still old. ■ Deferred maintenance remains the elephant in the room that America just doesn't want to address. College buildings are sometimes generously funded by benefactors at the time of construction but inadequately endowed for the long term. Computer systems are designed for the state of the art in one period but never fundamentally upgrades, leaving airlines (for example) still using dot-matrix printers. Cities build ambitious infrastructure projects with wide boulevards and eye-catching bridges, but neglect to upgrade the hidden infrastructure of levees and pipes and sewers that make urban life sustainable. ■ America is exceptionally good at tearing down the old and replacing it with the new; this much is to our credit. But we need to find ways to grow more dedicated to the often uninspiring but essential duty to pay for ongoing maintenance as an investment. That tends to express itself in political outcomes, but it starts as a cultural choice: We have to value a practice enough to be conscious of what it does for us, and to be ashamed if we don't follow through on doing it. Rust and entropy eventually come for almost all things.