Concrete masons Nelson Rego, of Fall River, Mass., right, and Joe Rego, of Hudson, Mass., left, no relation, install reinforcement bars for decorative construction Thursday in front of the Capitol Cove condominium project, in Providence, R.I.

Providence, R.I. ? River views, granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, 9-foot ceilings. This is student housing?

When classes start this fall — if all goes as planned — more than 300 students at Johnson & Wales University will be living in Capitol Cove, an upscale condominium project that had been languishing on the market for more than six months.

“It’s a great Band-Aid,” said Irving Schneider, president of Johnson & Wales’s Providence campus, which just signed a three-year lease for the Capitol Cove development. “This arrangement was good for the developer as well as Johnson & Wales.”

Some universities around the country have found a silver lining to the real estate recession that has left condominium developers in the lurch. For less time and money than it would take to build a residence hall, universities in places like New York City and Ohio are buying or leasing entire condo projects. And they are also eyeing vacant lots once targeted for high-end condos for use as retail and parking.

“This is a bonanza of an opportunity … for universities to acquire the space they desperately need,” said Dan Fasulo, managing director of Real Capital Analytics.

For developers, such deals save their projects from being total washouts. The arrangements offer builders an exit strategy from flagging projects, allowing them to unload dozens of unsold units to a single buyer rather than piecemeal.

“They can’t sell them, they can’t mothball them, they can’t bulldoze them,” said Jack McCabe, a Florida-based real estate analyst. “Developers right now are looking for every way not to lose their projects into foreclosure.”

Sales of condos in April were down 9 percent from year-ago levels and are off 46 percent from the frenzied peak in June 2005, the National Association of Realtors said this week. At the current, sluggish sales pace there is more than a year’s supply of units on the market.

Developer Robert Roth has built only one of five buildings planned for Capitol Cove’s 5-acre site that bridges downtown Providence with the city’s residential East Side.

He began marketing the condos last fall for between $350,000 and $550,000, but got only four reservations and no sales.

Students at Johnson & Wales University will pay yearly rents of $10,383 for one-bedroom apartments and $9,249 to share a two-bedroom unit — comparable prices to on-campus dorms.

“We want the students to treat it more as if it was their home than just a dorm room,” said Jamie Stone, 21, a Johnson & Wales student who will be a resident assistant at the building.

In Ohio, Capital University bought a 30-unit building for $4 million in suburban Columbus that had been marketed as 55-and-older housing but is now reserved for about 60 upperclassmen in good academic standing.