Designing a Smarter Class of Student Housing

From residential towers to large-scale mixed-use projects, design teams throughout the country are increasingly choosing mass timber for its architectural appeal and lower carbon footprint, as well as its offsite prefabrication advantages. “When done right, mass timber lets us build the same building with less labor and roughly 25–30% faster than a conventional post-tension concrete equivalent,” says Mark Bell, CEO of Harbor Bay Ventures. “When affordability and housing are in crisis, that kind of speed isn’t just a nice-to-have—it can be part of the solution.”

The Chicago-based developer—with the support of an experienced mass timber team including DLR Group, Forefront Structural Engineers, and SmartLam—is looking to realize these benefits in the construction of a landmark student housing project located at the corner of Columbus, Ohio’s High Street and Ninth Avenue—just minutes from the OSU campus. Projected to be the tallest mass timber student housing project in the United States, it’s an endeavor that could serve as a replicable prototype for student housing at campuses across the country, and its success hinges on understanding how to get the most out of mass timber construction.

And the Harbor Bay interdisciplinary team is not short on expertise. Harbor Bay Ventures cut its teeth on INTRO, a 350,000-square-foot mixed-use mass timber development in Cleveland that includes residential units, commercial space, and a central public plaza—one of the largest completed mass timber projects in the United States. Architecture firm DLR Group is widely recognized for advancing tall wood design and for a national portfolio of mass timber offices and mixed-use buildings (including the T3 developments) that balance practical replicability with refined design. Forefront, the project’s structural engineer of record and one of the leading mass timber engineering firms in the country, is known for deep expertise in CLT/glulam systems and the type of early-stage systems coordination that streamlines construction. SmartLam North America, the mass timber fabricator, brings U.S.-made CLT and glulam production capacity, detailed shop-drawing precision, and extensive experience delivering pre-cut, pre-drilled components for rapid onsite assembly.

Slated for completion in summer 2027, the 13-story (12 stories of wood over a concrete podium) housing development will provide 186 units and 493 beds. This includes a mix of studio, one-, two-, and four-bedroom units arranged along efficient double-loaded corridors. Ground-level common areas—including a lobby, fitness space, study lounges, and resident amenities—activate the High Street façade, while the upper levels are formed by a stack of a repeating kit-of-parts plan framed in CLT floor panels and glulam beams. Most units feature exposed mass timber ceilings, and the building is designed to accommodate dense mechanical routing, generous natural light, and contemporary student-housing standards—all within a streamlined structural grid optimized for speed, cost, and replication.

Sharpening the Pencil: Making the Grade with Mass Timber

How do you make mass timber affordable housing pencil out? The mistake some teams make is treating mass timber like a simple material swap—conceiving of a conventional concrete or steel frame and only then asking, “Can we make this mass timber?” By that point, most of the structural and cost decisions are already locked in, and the very efficiencies that make wood competitive have been designed out of the project, Bell points out. “The key with mass timber is simplicity and working with, not against, its prefab advantages,” says Cameron Jacobson, senior associate at DLR Group. “It wants to be a kit of parts—columns, beams, and a clean grid. When you let the structure lead the architecture instead of the other way around, everything gets more efficient.”

To truly capture mass timber’s cost and prefab advantages, the student housing project near OSU is designed around the unique benefits of the material itself: tuning the grid, streamlining the structure, and aligning every detail with the manufacturer’s specific fabrication capacities. For this project, that meant supporting the double-loaded corridor plan with a repeating structural grid optimized specifically for SmartLam’s panel sizes and production tolerances.

“Ninety percent of this building is standard and 10% is custom,” says Derek Ratchford, CEO of SmartLam North America. “That’s how you keep mass timber economical—when the design aligns with what we can manufacture efficiently. When the grid matches our production capabilities, everything accelerates—fabrication, delivery, installation. That’s where mass timber really shines and starts to pencil out.”

Adjacent to the unit corridors, Forefront introduced slightly deeper girders in the unit bays—creating clean, unobstructed pathways for dense mechanical distribution—while keeping the corridor bays shallower to reduce material and simplify routing. The result is a grid and connection system tailored to the manufacturer: fewer custom steel embeds, more standardized off-the-shelf connectors, and pre-cut, pre-drilled CLT panels that will install faster and with far less labor uncertainty.

Ratchford also stresses that making mass timber economical isn’t just about grid logic—it’s about team discipline. “You can’t have 15 consultants each adding little extras,” he notes. “Mass timber rewards restraint. The more streamlined the team and the decision-making, the more efficiently we can model, fabricate, and ship the structure.” By keeping the scope tight, minimizing bespoke details, and focusing on repeatable solutions, the team avoids the kind of creeping complexity that slows fabrication and drives up cost in other materials. “Cut out the fat, keep the kit of parts consistent, and everything—from procurement to erection—moves faster,” he says.

To achieve all of this, Bell says, the team has to be almost obsessively proactive. “Mass timber doesn’t let you chase design in the field. You need the grid, penetrations, and connections resolved before you ever pour a footing,” he notes. Ratchford agrees: “With today’s fabrication tech, we can pre-cut every opening and connection down to a fraction of an inch—but that precision only pays off when the whole team leans into that level of early coordination.”

A Wood Outlook: Could Mass Timber Be the Future of Student Housing?

As mass timber construction—and its potential to help address housing challenges—expands, could student housing be an untapped market ripe for future growth? Bell and his team think so.

“Innovation equals simplicity, and simplicity equals solving affordable housing,” Bell says. “We have to be able to build quicker, faster, more sustainably as one ingredient to the affordable housing crisis.”

Ratchford says the project is already getting attention. “We’re fielding calls about this building before it’s even broken ground,” he notes. “With the urgent need to boost housing options, there’s keen interest  to understand this model—how the grid works, how the kit-of-parts works, what it means for cost and speed. There’s a lot of excitement about what this could unlock.”

That enthusiasm reflects broader market conditions: New beds delivered annually have dropped nearly 40% compared to the previous decade, while enrollment and rents continue to rise—leaving universities and developers scrambling for faster, more efficient ways to add housing.

Bell sees an opportunity for mass timber to meet that moment. “Our hope is that this becomes a case study—a springboard that challenges other developers to build out of something we think is a better product for multiple reasons,” he says. If this project performs as expected, Bell adds, “there’s no reason we couldn’t rinse and repeat this model in other markets. That’s the future—simple, predictable, repeatable mass timber buildings that help close the housing gap.”