This semester, Georgetown University will take its 2010 Campus Plan to the District of Columbia Zoning Commission to get approvals on all its construction projects for the next decade. Unfortunately, the University’s neighbors—unhappy that the plan, in their view, will exacerbate what they see as overcrowding in their neighborhoods—have started a full-fledged misinformation campaign in an attempt to force the University to accept more of their demands.
Since the first community meeting about the campus plan in May 2009, the University has made good faith efforts to solicit feedback from neighbors and alter the plan accordingly. Unfortunately, neighborhood groups such as the Burleith Citizens Association and Citizens Association of Georgetown have continually worked to create an atmosphere of hostility between Georgetown students, administrators, and members of the surrounding community by choosing to highlight only the facts that support their individual agendas. In the neighborhoods’ latest attack on Georgetown’s 2010 Campus Plan, for example, an op-ed in the Georgetowner, a group of citizens associations claim that Georgetown plans to increase enrollment by 3,400 students without providing on-campus housing, which they say will push the additional students into neighboring communities.
But their alarmist wording, suggesting that undergraduates are going to invade the area around Georgetown in droves, completely misrepresents what the plan proposes. As University officials have explained in community meetings as early as November 2009, undergraduate enrollment is not going to increase. The 3,400 students will be enrolled in graduate and professional programs, and most of them students will be commuting from Maryland and Virginia, where they already have homes and families. Furthermore, the University does intend to build an on-campus housing complex for additional graduate students on the 1789 and Tombs block. They had initially planned to accommodate 250 to 300 graduate students, but neighbors complained so forcefully about neighborhood density that they scaled back their plans to propose only 120 beds for graduate students and faculty.
Luckily, the University has not buckled to neighborhood demands. The University has wisely refused to go along with residents’ main complaint and agree to build new on-campus housing for undergraduates. The University built the Southwest Quad, which can house over 900 students, in 2003 and adding more undergraduate housing would require building dorms in the few open spaces we have left, such as Harbin patio. Besides, upperclassmen students would likely choose off-campus houses over new dorm-style residence halls anyway.
After over a year of negotiations, this is the 2010 Campus Plan. Neighbors, students, and University officials have all seen some of their desires compromised. No plan would satisfy everyone, but with the deadline for submitting the plan closing in, neighborhood associations and University administrators should be less interested in opposing one another and more interested in agreeing to move forward.
