Chris James, 39, moves wreckage into large trash containers during demolition on the 1300 block of Kentucky Street Wednesday. MORGAN WALKER/HERALD

New housing plans could create a community for graduate students, families and non-traditional students now scattered throughout Bowling Green or dorms.

Demolition began Tuesday in preparation for new student living that would house those three groups.

The apartments will be across from the Kentucky Street lot, said Brian Kuster, director of Housing and Residence Life.

Throughout the next several months, HRL will select an architect and lay out the apartment design based on what students want, Kuster said.

“We’re going at this as a blank slate,” he said.

HRL is still a year away from breaking ground on the project, which will probably be completed in fall 2011, Kuster said.

There will be 60 apartments in the initial phase of the project, with room to add more housing if there’s a demand for it, he said.

The idea for the apartments was set in motion after a housing survey HRL conducted at the end of the spring 2009 semester, Kuster said. The survey found that there’s a need for graduate students and family housing.

“We don’t want to assume that if we build it, students would come,” he said.

Danielle Racke, a graduate student from Greenwood, Ind., lives in an off-campus apartment.

Racke said the graduate students she knows try to find apartments within walking distance of campus rather than live in undergraduate dorms.

“There’s a big difference between the graduate and undergraduate mentality,” she said. “We want a quiet space to go back to at the end of a 13- to 14-hour day.”

The graduate students she knows are scattered in several different off-campus locations and don’t have a place to connect with each other, Racke said.

Because Racke didn’t get her undergraduate degree from Western, she didn’t know anyone when she first came, she said. Even now, she’s only around other graduate students in her department.

The new apartments for graduate students would provide those students with a chance to have a community, Racke said.

Michael Kelly is a graduate student from Springfield, Tenn., who lives in Pearce-Ford Tower.

Most of the graduate students he knows live in apartments, so it’s hard to coordinate studying and getting together with them, he said.

Kelly said he would prefer living with other graduate students because he has such a different schedule than his undergraduate roommate in PFT.

Living in an on-campus apartment for graduate students would be a good opportunity for him, he said.

“I don’t have a car, so it’s either something on campus or nothing,” Kelly said.

Construction continues on the 1300 block of Kentucky Street Wednesday. The goal is to build apartment-style housing for Western students. MORGAN WALKER/HERALD