The first sign of trouble came early. When a college opens a new residence hall, it typically starts marketing the facility to students the year before the new beds will be ready, in order to better attract tenants.

Hicks says the agreement with the university mandated that it sign off on all marketing materials associated with the project, so Balfour Beatty passed along the materials to the university's housing department for approval in October 2017.

The hope was that brochures and social-media posts would be ready to send out to students by December of that year.

But it wasn’t until April 2018, just

weeks before students were supposed to make their deposits for the following fall, that the housing department approved the materials. “We lost, in essence, an entire year of marketing,” Hicks says.

Standard & Poor's, a bond-rating agency, took note. In May the agency saw that Provident was behind in its marketing and had few tenants for the apartments. It downgraded the bonds for the project, signaling a potentially risky investment to investors.

Hicks believes that the materials were slow-walked through the approval process because the Cross Village project was driven by the president and other top administrators. Housing-department officials had not been involved in the project, and according to Hicks, “they had no interest in it.”