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Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer
Three young men injured in a recent balcony collapse at the University of North Texas seem to be recovering nicely. But officials in Denton, Texas, are asking questions about the private developer that built the student-housing complex.
Two of the injured men, Garrett Draper and Tony Garcia, have been treated and released from Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth. A third, Grant Draper, is in good condition. They fell from a third-story balcony when it collapsed at The Grove, a student-apartment complex that had opened two weeks earlier.
Campus Crest Communities, of Charlotte, North Carolina, has developed student housing under its Grove brand at about 30 campuses around the country. A project is planned for Auburn University here in Alabama, and CEO Ted Rollins has ties to our state through his involvement in a troubling divorce case that has been the subject of several Legal Schnauzer posts.
We have been asking questions about Ted Rollins and his business/legal practices for quite a while. Now, folks at the University of North Texas are raising similar questions.
The North Texas Daily, in an editorial, says The Grove in Denton was built in a tight time frame:
The Grove apartments were constructed over the summer and went up in about two months--an alarmingly fast turnaround. That should have been a red flag to the building inspector to spend enough time thoroughly checking the building.
The paper also raised questions about the whole notion of private companies building student housing at public universities:
In its 10-K form filed with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission, Campus Crest touted its vertically integrated platform to investors. According to the document, Campus Crest has ownership of the companies that perform every part of The Grove development process.
As Ted W. Rollins, CEO of Campus Crest, pointed out in an interview with Multi-Housing News (MHN) the company stands to benefit 100 percent from the value creation of The Grove entities.
In other words, they have a direct financial incentive to build quickly and cheaply.
A Houston personal-injury law firm, Denena & Points, already has taken note of the North Texas case. A post on the firm's blog points to negligence in the balcony collapse:
Pictures of The Grove apartments in Denton, TX show a (very) few holes where the balcony was anchored into the wall in some way. It appears that the balcony had no supportive ledger board. Or if there was one, it does not appear that it was attached in any way to the apartment wall. It is clear from the number and positioning of the holes that the balcony could not have supported much weight.
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