Hospital Parking Ramp 1 and the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center still stand on the University of Iowa Health Care campus. For about two years, both were expected to disappear. They sat on the footprint UI Health Care had picked for its new inpatient tower. Around them, the university put in what the tower would need: a new parking ramp, a new water tower, a new connector road off Newton Road and a new academic building. Those projects were the first step toward the tower.
In September, UI Health Care cancelled the tower. Nearly everything built to make room for it is staying. For anyone living just uphill in Manville Heights, the big change in the plan matters less than it sounds. The streets, ramps and buildings at the edge of campus were rebuilt for a tower that won't be built, and that work is mostly done.
A $2 Billion Building Comes Off the Plan
On Sept. 9, 2026, UI Health Care published a facilities strategy update that drops the new patient care tower on the university campus. Instead, the system will modernize and expand existing space on its university and downtown campuses. The system expects the revised approach to add about 100 patient beds and to serve an estimated 23,000 patients sooner than the tower would have. It also says the approach does not deliver everything the tower would have, such as new operating rooms. The Iowa Board of Regents reviewed the revised capital plan at its September 16–17, 2026 meeting in Cedar Falls.
The size of the cancelled building shows how much of the plan has changed. The Gazette reported that the tower would have covered 842,000 gross square feet, 66 percent more than the 507,000-square-foot UI Stead Family Children's Hospital. It was supposed to open by 2030. The paper also reported that UI Health Care had already spent more than $200 million on early tower work, including planning, design and feasibility studies. That figure does not include construction on the projects meant to clear space for the tower.
UI Health Care first proposed the tower in its 2022 facilities plan. At the time, officials said more than 44 percent of the hospital's 848 beds would be "obsolete" by 2031 without renovation. Demand hasn't eased. In the last fiscal year, UI Health Care recorded more than 41,000 inpatient admissions and still had to turn away 3,000 to 5,000 patient transfers because of space limits. The hospital still needs more beds. It now plans to find them inside the buildings it already has.
The Projects That Came First
The tower needed supporting work before construction could start, and The Gazette listed four "enabling projects": a new $17.5 million road, a $75 million parking ramp, a water tower and the $250 million Health Sciences Academic Building. Here is where each one stands, based on the latest university reports.
| Project | Where it is | What it was for | Status in the latest report |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hawkeye Parking Ramp | Part of Lot 43, north of Kinnick Stadium | 985 spaces to replace Hospital Parking Ramp 1 | Opened March 2025 |
| New water tower | Parking Lot 75 | Took over from the Hawkins Drive tower | Now serving the university |
| Old Hawkins Drive water tower | Hawkins Drive near the main entrance | Removal | Weekend dismantling scheduled July 10 through end of August 2026 |
| Newton Road connector | Between Ramp 1 and General Hospital | Links Newton Road to the fountain entrance, with a roundabout and bus stop | Work continuing under the revised plan |
| Health Sciences Academic Building | South Grand Avenue and Melrose Avenue | New space for programs moved out of older buildings | Final work done summer 2026 |
The ramp shows the order of events most clearly. The March 2025 construction update describes the Hawkeye Parking Ramp as the replacement for Hospital Ramp 1. It opened that month. The replacement parking was built and in use about 18 months before the building it was meant to make room for was cancelled.
The water tower followed the same order. The new tower in Lot 75 had to be working before the Hawkins Drive tower could come down. Its removal was set for weekends from 6 p.m. Friday to 3 a.m. Monday. During that work, Hawkins Drive was cut to one lane in each direction, and traffic leaving Ramp 1 was sent along Hospital Drive to Newton Road. The Gazette photographed crews dismantling the tower on July 12.
Why the Edge Kept Changing Without the Tower
UI Health Care's September statement explains why these projects are continuing:
"While the projects were initially planned together to make way for the patient care tower, they still serve to remove aging infrastructure and support traffic flow around the university campus."
The same statement lists the work going forward: replacing the water tower and removing the old one, moving some health care services out of the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center and the Center for Disabilities and Development, and the Newton Road connections.
Wendell Johnson shows how the plan was built. Moving programs out of it was first a way to clear the tower site, but the move also gave those programs better space. The university's facilities office reports that the Health Sciences Academic Building at South Grand and Melrose finished its final work in summer 2026 and now houses three UI programs. One of them, Communication Sciences and Disorders, is the department most closely tied to the speech and hearing building. Those moves still make sense without a tower, which is why they continued after it was cancelled.
UI Health Care's leaders also explained why the plan changed. As The Gazette reported, CEO Brad Haws said, "When the university's facilities master plan was developed five years ago, the health care environment looked much different than it does today." The Gazette also reported that budget documents released with the update showed the hospital system would have run a $124.1 million deficit last year without $465.7 million in directed Medicaid payment revenue, which will be capped in the future. The financial outlook changed after the ramp, the water tower and the academic building were already in progress.
Melrose and Hawkins Are Next in Line for a Childcare Center
The next new building planned for the campus edge is a childcare center, and it comes from a separate campus plan.
In June, UI Health Care asked the Regents for budget approval for a 9,600-square-foot childcare center west of Parking Lot 49, near Melrose Avenue and Hawkins Drive. It will include classrooms, a warming kitchen and a playground. UI Health Care will own the building, and Bright Horizons will run it. Bright Horizons, which runs the current center, plans to serve 104 children there. Construction was expected to run from summer 2026 through spring 2027. The Daily Iowan reported the Regents' approval on July 2.
The center is moving because of a chain of planned projects:
- The current childcare center is inside Westlawn, at 200 Newton Road.
- UI Health Care says the center has to move before Westlawn can be demolished under the UI Campus Master Plan.
- The university has named the Westlawn site for a proposed Cancer Research Building.
- UI Facilities Management describes the Westlawn project as razing the 137,238-square-foot building to prepare the site for future development. It lists the project as "Preliminary."
None of these steps depended on the tower. The September update also says UI Health Care wants room to expand specialty and cancer care access. So cancer research is still part of the plan for the Newton Road side of campus, even though the inpatient tower is not.
UI Health Care calls the childcare center important for recruitment and retention because it mainly serves UI Health Care faculty and staff with young children. The building is designed for a larger hospital workforce, and UI Health Care says the added capacity will help support that growth.
Where the Added Beds Go Instead
The beds UI Health Care still needs will come from buildings that already exist. The September statement points to recent renovations as examples: the neonatal intensive care unit, the Burn Treatment Center, the 3 Center inpatient unit on the downtown campus, and the emergency department expansion on the university campus. Haws named intensive care units as one of the areas where the new approach will "improve access in the pockets where it is needed most."
That means future hospital construction near Newton Road and Hawkins Drive will mostly be renovation inside existing buildings, not one large new structure going up. The work around those buildings is already well along. The Hawkeye ramp has been open since March 2025, the Lot 75 water tower is in service, the academic building at South Grand and Melrose is occupied, and the childcare center on Melrose was scheduled for construction from summer 2026 through spring 2027. Ramp 1 and Wendell Johnson are still in place, with Ramp 1's replacement parking already open north of Kinnick.
Changes at the hospital campus show up in Manville Heights through traffic, parking and new buildings on the next block. If you own a home near this edge of campus and want to know how the finished projects and what's still planned could affect what your property is worth, Adam Pretorius can walk you through it. Request your home valuation and we'll go over what's changed along Newton Road and Melrose and what's next.
