On Monday, Aug. 25th, a handful of Georgetown students gathered in Healy Hall for the first of several orientation sessions for those living off-campus. Several University representatives attended, including Charles VanSant, interim director of off-campus student life, and Jeanne Lord, interim associate vice president for student affairs. The meeting also featured a Metropolitan Police Officer, a contingent from the District’s Department of Motor Vehicles, a representative from the Department of Public Works, and a GU Department of Public Safety officer. Taking turns at the room’s wooden podium, they discussed in detail the University’s and the city’s requirements for how students conduct themselves while living off-campus.
The meeting had its lighter moments: “We enjoy the students,” said the Metro officer. “It gives us a break from chasing drug dealers.” But it was also not without disagreement. One of the two women from the Department of Motor Vehicles had only spoken for a few moments when she told the students that if they brought a car to Washington, D.C., they were not required to register it here.
VanSant and Lord looked at one another uneasily, and as the speaker continued, they both leapt up and asked her if she was certain about the registration requirement. She was, but so were they.
“Our BZA has been very clear,” said VanSant. Students have to register their cars in D.C., he said, period. They debated back and forth for a moment, then the DMV representatives stepped outside, where they spoke with several University staff members. VanSant, with urgency in his voice, told students again that they had to register their cars with the district.
The point seems like a minor one. Why does anyone, let alone the University, care where you register your car?
The University cares for one very specific reason-the neighbors care. They want students to be better monitored by local and University authorities, and they have voiced their concerns to the D.C. Board of Zoning Adjustment, which, along with the D.C. Zoning Commission, has the power to approve or deny new University construction.
This was the meeting’s overall message: Students living off campus have a responsibility, not just to stay safe, but to have a positive (or at least a neutral) relationship with the community. What’s at stake is more than just the University’s reputation among its neighbors. The power granted local authorities to approve or deny changes to Georgetown’s enrollment and physical plan means that the way students behave while living off-campus has a lasting impact on Georgetown.
In VanSant’s words, it “affects the future of the institution.”
The University has made some progress in mediating the relationship between students who live off-campus and their non-student neighbors. The orientation sessions are relatively new, one of several programs to help ease tensions between students and the community.
But the most effective way to appease residents is to simply get students out of the neighborhood, and the new Southwest Quadrangle has supplied the University with hundreds of additional on-campus beds, bringing the total proportion of students housed on-campus to nearly 90 percent. Neighborhood input in the planning process ensured that the Southwest Quadrangle was built before any other additional buildings to relieve the pressure on off-campus housing.
While the University would like to use some of the additional space provided by the Southwest Quad to expand undergraduate enrollment, the long-term goals of the University lie closer to developing and expanding the graduate programs, a move more acceptable to Georgetown’s vocal neighbors.
But this, too, requires community approval, and the University’s efforts to draw students back on campus may help grease the wheels as Georgetown seeks zoning approval for its academic expansions. Members of the neighborhoods surrounding the campus found in the late ‘80s that they didn’t like what the University had become. Fortunately for them, neither did the University.
Fifteen years ago, students living off campus were relatively unmonitored by the University.
Pat Scolaro, a former president of the Burleith Citizens’ Association, has lived in the neighborhood for almost 30 years. She described the students living off campus in the late ‘80s as more disruptive than current students.
“They were very young, very immature,” she said about her student neighbors in Burleith. “First time away from home.”
By the late ‘80s, local residents began to organize to get the University’s attention. When Georgetown looked to get its 10-Year Plan approved by the Board of Zoning Adjustment in 1990, they had their opportunity.
The zoning review process is a way for local residents and officials to ensure that the University’s planned expansion does not offend users of nearby properties. Under D.C. law, every 10 years, the University must submit a plan to local zoning authorities outlining its plans for changes to enrollment and the physical makeup of the campus.
Between two rounds of plans, in 1990 and 2000, the BZA and the University worked to organize a complete system for managing students living off-campus. Residents also wanted a guarantee that undergrad enrollment would not expand too rapidly; the University agreed to add no more than 389 students by 2010.
In return, the University has received approval of its 10-year plans, the most recent of which includes numerous proposed construction projects. The Southwest Quadrangle is only the first of several planned structures, which will eventually include a new performing arts center, a new stadium, renovations to the gym, and seven new academic buildings.
Through the Office of Off Campus Student Life, headed by VanSant, the University offers a variety of programs to meet local residents’ quality-of-life concerns. Two of the most important issues for area residents have been trash pickup and late-night parties; the University has instituted programs to deal with both problems. Bulk trash service is available to students during peak moving times. Before the service was implemented, according to Scolaro, students would simply make piles of their trash that was too big to fit in garbage cans-mostly unwanted furniture.
“The students would leave, and everything would go out into the alleys,” Scolaro said. “It was awful.”
The other major issue, of course, is partying. The age-old method for getting your student neighbors to rein in their socializing is to call the police. In an attempt to make life a little easier on students (who face $300 fines from MPD), the University has developed a hotline for local residents who wish to report loud parties. The Student Neighborhood Assistance Program (SNAP) gives students a little more leeway before finding themselves staring down a police officer. It also gives the University a chance to try to develop ties between the Office of Off-Campus Life and students living off campus; the idea is that complaints about student conduct will be handled in-house.
But these solutions are of questionable effectiveness. Despite the University’s best efforts, every year, a fresh crop of students moves off campus, and the same problems recur.
Consequently, the community’s feelings about the University’s efforts have been mixed. According to Barbara Zartman, an area resident involved with the Citizens Association of Georgetown, residents’ feelings about the University’s efforts are a function of where they live. For some, there has been a change. “But if you happen to live on lower 35th [Street] or Prospect Street, you would say things haven’t improved very much at all,” she said.
After years of attempts at mediating between neighbors who can’t get any sleep and students who aren’t particularly bothered by that, the University has used its strongest tool in student-neighbor relations: building another dorm, deep inside the campus, and watching it fill with students.
To many, it is surprising how eager students have been to rush back on campus. There are innumerable reasons why juniors and seniors might prefer living off-campus to living in the dorms or in a campus apartment. Living off campus is often cheaper. Most students living on-campus pay between $700 and $800 per month for their housing. A student living in a four-person Henle apartment will pay $6,994 for the year-$777 per month. Some students unfortunate enough to get do triples get a discount-those living in “forced triples” in the Southwest Quad only pay $664 per month.
The cost of living off-campus isn’t as straightforward. Some students live in aging houses crowded with eight or nine roommates; some have luxurious one-bedroom apartments; some even live in the Cloisters. But for the past several years, $700 a month would have gotten one far. Even with utilities factored in, which most students living off campus pay separately, that amount of money could easily land a single room in a house, or even a one-bedroom apartment. Many students with comparable housing pay closer to $600. And in addition to providing privacy-both from a roommate and from a resident assistant-off-campus housing can offer such advantages as full kitchens with dishwashers, washers and dryers in your own home, front yards, back decks and rooms that can be decorated with tables and chairs other than the standard University-issue dorm furniture. Paying the extra $100 per month to live on campus usually gets you a cramped bedroom furnished with bunk beds, small windows, and a roommate.
But despite these differences, where undergraduates are concerned, convenience is perhaps the biggest factor. Having the cost of your utilities factored into the rent-and not having to pay rent every month, and instead having mom and/or dad cut a check at the beginning of the year-is something that students appreciate. Reliable high-speed Internet access is also important; no off-campus apartment has multiple T3 lines at their disposal. But the biggest advantage is the ease of signing up: Students who wish to live on campus just sign on the dotted line when the University tells them. No scrambling to find a place to rent, no setting up utilities. If you don’t want to, you don’t even have to find roommates.
The ease of living on campus is so popular that last October, when the Office of Housing Services announced that all students wishing to live on-campus would be able to do so, students rushed to sign up for campus housing. Too many students, in fact, and they exceeded the number of beds on campus, even including those available in the Southwest Quadrangle. The shortage of on-campus housing wasn’t announced until February, well after most students sign their leases for the following academic year, so many students had a difficult time finding housing for this year. But the “shortage” also clouds any attempt to figure out how the addition of the Southwest Quadrangle will affect the off-campus housing market.
Faced with competition from a reinvigorated University housing system which could house all the students it wanted, many local landlords dropped rents by as much as 20 percent to get students to sign leases. In the past, off-campus landlords have often had most of their properties rented by the end of the first semester. This past year, many had to wait until February. Some houses still sit empty.
But it is a safe assumption that over the next few years, the Southwest Quadrangle will reduce demand for student housing, and turnover in the local market will ensue. Landlords who purchased investment properties in the past few years (with prices starting at $500,000 for a Burleith house) may find that with reduced demand, they could do better by selling the house as a single-family residence.
But right now, it is hard to tell. According to a landlord reluctant to use his name (“People that rent to students tend to get a lot of negative attention from the neighborhood,” he said), next year should give a stronger indication of the rent level for off-campus students.
Those students who do remain off-campus will not necessarily be distributed as broadly as undergraduate students are right now. Scott Polk, a real estate agent with Long & Foster, believes that as demand for housing contracts, students may avoid Burleith and concentrate on finding property in West Georgetown.
“My experience, having dealt with a number of students, is that given the choice, they live in West Georgetown,” he said. “If you lived in Burleith it was driven by economics or availability.”
More than a few Burleith residents would be excited to see students abandoning the area. Candith Pallandre, who teaches English as a Second Language at Georgetown, noted in the September newsletter of the Burleith Citizens Association that “Burleith residents can only be pleased at the increased housing capacity on Georgetown’s campus.” West Georgetown residents may have similar hopes about their neighborhood, though its much less likely that students would avoid an area that places them squarely between campus and the nightlife and shopping along M Street and Wisconsin Avenue.
But in Burleith this year, student life seems to be continuing as normal. The packs of students moving through Henle towards 37th Street on weekend nights look as big as they did last year.
“There have been some horrendous situations and parties the first couple weekends, so we really don’t know yet,” said Scolaro about the possibility of students moving out of the area. “We just don’t know.”
Regardless of how or when local real estate starts to change hands, the University has plans for its student body that will eventually affect the makeup of the off-campus student population.
Building the Future, the strategic plan for the main campus released in 2001, noted that “[t]he University has increasingly recognized that strengthening graduate programs benefits all aspects of University life.” One year later, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, a private accreditation group, visited Georgetown for its periodic review. The Middle States report found that “[t]he self-study and the observations of the site visit team indicate that Georgetown plans to expand its research and graduate programs, while not risking or compromising the integrity of its undergraduate programs.”
It’s a solid strategy for a school trying to solidify its tenuous position as a top-tier university. Most of the schools that are synonymous with the very best in American education have extremely well-developed graduate programs. Accordingly, they often have much larger graduate student populations than Georgetown. Adding to the graduate student body would be a natural part of strengthening Georgetown’s programs: if you want your graduate programs to produce more research and scholarship, you’ll probably have to add students.
While the University’s plans to beef up its graduate pro grams have been public for some time, there has been no discussion of if or when the school will add significantly to the graduate student population. While the current 10-Year Plan will include seven new academic and administrative buildings, those are mostly intended to meet current needs, and there has been no public discussion of graduate school expansion in the near future.
But in the event that the University moves to expand the graduate school before 2010, zoning limitations aren’t likely to be a problem. Zoning requirements for the University say nothing about graduate student enrollment. The enrollment cap imposed by the Board of Zoning Administration refers to “traditional” undergraduate students: full-time undergrads living on or near campus, as opposed to part-timers, commuter students and graduate students.
Such a policy assumes that these “traditional” students are the only students who negatively impact local quality-of-life issues; the rest of the student body in theory brings all of the benefits of a University community-a diverse mix of energetic young students-without exposing residents to animated after-hours behavior. So if their numbers do expand, or they move closer to campus, Georgetown’s neighbors won’t be nearly as upset.
Grad students are elusive compared to undergrads. You can’t necessarily track them by their keg cups and Hoyas shorts, and they’re more difficult to separate out from non-student young professionals. But they seem to be spread out among neighborhoods further from campus, such as Glover Park, Foxhall and East Palisades.
Polk, who is also the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for Foxhall and East Palisades, has a theory about why graduate students live further away: “Principally, they’re paying anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000 per year for an education. You might say their current performance equals future earnings. They need a nice quiet neighborhood to study.” Polk noted that the neighborhood generally has a positive impression of its graduate students. “The graduate students who we have, they’re quiet med students don’t make a lot of noise,” he said. “They work like hell. They only have two parties a year, and they pass out by 10 o’clock.”
He paused, then corrected himself: “They don’t pass out, they’re just tired.”
If the University can consistently keep 90 percent of undergraduates on campus, more and more rental spaces in Burleith and West Georgetown will remain unfilled, leaving many to question who will fill the demand.
Polk suggested one possibility. “The question is,” he said, “will Burleith suddenly become more popular with graduate students?”
If it does-and grad students find that Burleith is quiet enough for their tastes-the University will have significantly mended its relations with the neighbors.
