Downtown Buildings Lure University Tenants

"In other cities’ centers, schools are popping up in old and under-used buildings, and also here in Providence, with the Rhode Island School of Design’s recent plans to turn one of the former Fleet buildings into student apartments and Brown University’s acquisition and rehab of the former Speidel building on Ship Street.“The real issue here is that in older urban downtown markets, you have a lot of older buildings, which are now essentially functionally obsolete for office-type use,” said Charles T. Francis, president and partner at CB Richard Ellis New England Partners. “This is a perfect setting for college and university uses (and) for rehabbing buildings of an historic nature..."