Ohio State’s Office of Housing, Food Services and Event Centers has proposed a new graduate and professional student housing facility to resolve the lack of available on-campus housing.New housing is necessary because Morrison Tower, a graduate residence hall, will be converted to an undergraduate residence hall in September. The move is to accommodate the 350 undergraduate student dorm spaces which were eliminated because of the Ohio Stadium renovations.Meanwhile, graduate students will be allocated housing in Jones Tower and a number of campus-owned units on West Lane, West 10th and Neil avenues beginning in the summer, said Jodie Moffett, a student assistant at Housing, Food Services and Event Centers.The proposed new graduate student housing consists of an apartment complex that will be three-and-a-half stories tall, with a wooden frame and a brick veneer, and will include garden-level apartments. Rent is expected to be between $600 and $1,000 a month.The apartment complex will have 168 units, made up of a combination of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments for a total of 312 bedrooms. The square footage for each apartment is 540 square feet for a one-bedroom unit, 825 square feet for a two-bedroom unit, and 1,100 square feet for a three-bedroom unit, with a total of about 160,000 square feet for the entire project.According to the proposal, the preliminary budget for the apartment complex ranges from $17 million to $20 million. As is the norm, funding for the project will come from the Housing, Food Services and Event Centers, but funds for land acquisition will be provided by the university’s Land Purchase Account. The complex is expected to be located on south campus. The committee overseeing the project, whose members include representatives from the Office of University Architect and Physical Planning and the Council of Graduate Students, is currently debating its location.The entire project is still in the planning stages, said Bill Hall, vice president of Housing, Food Services and Event Centers. Hall estimated that it will take about 18 months before construction for the complex begins.Land acquisition has always been a difficult process for the committee, Hall said, and it has to be done delicately. Other issues that are being discussed are traffic and parking, and of course the actual staging of the project.The lack of on-campus graduate and professional student housing has always been a problem, said Kathleen Carberry, president of Council of Graduate Students. “The problem is even more critical this year with the transformation of Morrison Tower from a graduate student residence into undergraduate housing,” Carberry said. “The issue demands immediate, effective and efficient action.”Carberry also expressed her concern about a lack of housing for the international graduate community who, she said, would probably suffer the most. “Many of the graduate students here are from foreign countries, and quite a large number of them reside in [Morrison] Tower,” she said. “Once [Morrison] Tower is made into an undergraduate housing facility, they’re going to have to find a place to live somewhere else, and they might lose the sense of security that on-campus housing has been able to provide for them.”