GVSU addition may expand health program

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - For 17 years, Sherrie Flores has owned a northeast Grand Rapids home that sits directly across from the site where Grand Valley State University is looking at building a second facility for its programs in a growing field: health sciences.

"It's progress," Flores told 24 Hour News 8 Thursday. "We need it. Michigan needs the jobs, needs the education."

And maybe someday, she said, her granddaughter could afford to go to school in the new building.

It would replace existing homes in the Belknap-Lookout neighborhood and sit immediately across I-196 from GVSU's existing Cook-DeVos Center for Health Sciences and the Medical Mile along Michigan Street.

But Flores said she still worries about traffic, higher taxes due to higher property values and where renters will go when the homes at the site come down.

Still, she said she thinks the development would be good for the neighborhoood as a whole.

The neighborhood association has not yet taken a formal position on the plan.

GVSU's vice president for university relations said the university sees it as an enhancement to the neighborhood.

"And of course it has the prospect of allowing us to admit additional students, to graduate more students in health professions," vice president Matt McLogan said.

The GVSU board would need to approve the plan at its meeting Friday. And if it does, the university could buy the properties -- 15 in all bordered by Lafayette and Prospect avenues and Hastings and Trowbridge streets -- for $3.25 million.

Rockford Development already owns all of the homes in question and offered the properties to the university, officials there said.

Renters would get one year's notice of plans to develop the site.

Construction is not expected to begin immediately, but McLogan said demand is there. The university cannot accept all the qualified health sciences students who apply.

"We have more than 5,000 of our 25,000 students involved in and enrolled in programs in the health professions -- nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician assitant and so on," he said. "We're out of room."