Capstone Development Partners Receives Two Innovator Awards for Portland Commons and McGoldrick Center for Career & Student Success at the University of Southern Maine

New Project Awarded Best P3 Development and Best New Development by a College or University at the Student Housing Business 14th Annual Innovator Awards Ceremony

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., May 1, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Capstone Development Partners ("Capstone") today announced that it received two Innovator Awards from Student Housing Business for its project, Portland Commons and the McGoldrick Center for Career & Student Success at the University of Southern Maine, in Portland, ME. The project was recognized as the Best Public-Private Partnership (P3) Development and Best New Development by a College or University at Student Housing Business' 14th Annual Innovator Awards event held during the Interface Student Housing conference in Austin, TX.

Located on USM's Portland campus, Portland Commons houses 580 upper-division undergraduates, graduate and law students, and residential staff, with a mix of single-and-double occupancy rooms, studios and larger apartments. The building's amenities include a community kitchen, lounge, two classrooms, bike room, lobby, and an eighth-floor lounge with views of the historic Portland and Back Cove. Encompassing 218,000 SF, Portland Commons is the second largest Passive House certified building at a university in the United States, and is among the top-10 largest Passive House certified buildings in the country. It is projected to use less than half the energy of a standard modern building, fulfilling a key USM sustainability goal for the project.
Located adjacent to Portland Commons, the new McGoldrick Center for Career & Student Success is centered on a one-acre quad named the "LL Bean Green", and is intended to be the heart of campus life. The 41,000 SF building offers a dining commons to the campus, serving a wide variety of locally-sourced and sustainable foods. Other building features include a student lounge, university store, a coffee bar and pub, a Career & Employment Hub, a 4,500 SF multi-purpose room to host career fairs, employer presentations and banquets, Student Diversity Center, offices for student organizations, lounge spaces for studying and socializing, commuter student lounge, parenting room, and a prayer and meditation room.

"These awards are a testament to the heart and soul invested in this project by every member of our University and Development Teams, and the talent and dedication of our many project partners. This partnership resulted in one of the most dramatic campus transformations we have seen, turning a non-descript surface parking lot with aging, low-rise buildings into a beautiful campus green, framed by new, student-centric facilities that have enhanced and brought new vitality and a strong sense of place to the Portland campus core. The project was procured and delivered between the fall of 2019 and the summer of 2023, one of the most challenging 4-year periods for real estate development and construction in the modern era, yet our teams persevered, overcame many obstacles, and did so with amazing teamwork and esprit de corps," said Jeff Jones, Principal, Capstone Development Partners.

Portland Commons and the McGoldrick Center for Career & Student Success was completed in August 2023 and was developed by Capstone in a P3 collaboration with the University of Southern Maine. The project was constructed by PC Construction and designed by Elkus Manfredi Architects and SMRT Architects and Engineers.

About Capstone Development Partners
Capstone Development Partners, LLC is a leading student housing developer in the on-campus and university-affiliated student housing market specializing in the development and management of student housing through Public-Private Partnerships. The company has offices in Birmingham, Alabama and Denver, Colorado. Since 1997, its principals and executives have led partnerships with over 70 public and private colleges and universities, delivering more than 47,000 beds of student housing nationwide. For more information please visit http://www.capdevpartners.com. 

Media Contact

Nicole Warren, Capstone Development Partners, 2059495052, [email protected], www.capdevpartners.com

SOURCE Capstone Development Partners