Off-Campus Blues: Life outside the gates

About a year ago, the front steps of Anna Dimon’s (COL ’11) house on Prospect Street collapsed and became completely unusable. After a year of things falling apart in the house, including breaking floors, an exploding water heater, and the doorknob falling off the basement door, the stairs were the last straw.
Dimon called her landlord, Joel Mack, who manages a company called Student Housing Association, and asked him to have her stairs fixed. About a week later, she came home to find the steps propped up with a piece of plywood tied with a piece of twine.
Dumbfounded, she called her landlord’s office again.
“I hope you’re kidding,” she said.
Nearly 1,000 juniors and seniors are living off-campus this academic year, the vast majority of them in Burleith and West Georgetown. Some of them may have experienced troubles with mice or break-ins during their time living on campus, but many have discovered that living off-campus comes with its own headaches—angry neighbors, gas leaks, broken appliances, disintegrating walls, rats, and predatory landlords.
This often subpar housing doesn’t come cheap, either: Georgetown’s Office of Off-Campus Housing claims that shared rooms in off campus houses in Burlieth and West Georgetown cost upwards of $1,200 per month, per student.
“You don’t get what you’re paying for,” Dimon said. “For the amount of money we’re paying these landlords, I would say our houses are not quite up to par.”
Undergraduates are required to live on campus for their first two years. After that, the University does not guarantee that it will provide students with housing. As a result, many upperclassmen rent properties off campus for a year or more from companies like SHA, which manages around 40 properties in Georgetown.
Students living in SHA properties complained of collapsing ceilings, broken appliances, and contractors who let themselves in and out while girls were sleeping, but the biggest grievance they shared was a lack of communication with their landlord.
“[Mack’s] policy is that you can’t communicate by writing with him—you have to call,” Dimon said. “He doesn’t want it in writing, because he doesn’t want a legal trail. But after you’re done living in his properties, you can’t communicate by phone, you have to write.”
To non-renters, SHA seems rather opaque. The company shares an office building—and a secretary—with another rental company, Metropolitan Properties Ltd., owned by Edward Hull. Neither Mack nor Hull responded to requests for comments.
According to a Voice article from Nov. 2, 2006, when the 2004 death of Georgetown senior Daniel Rigby in a townhouse fire spurred the D.C. government to inspect houses in the area, SHA placed flyers in many of its properties advising residents “not to allow [inspectors] in the house.” Many students listened and their houses were not inspected, meaning potentially dangerous violations might have gone unnoticed.
Another student who lives in an SHA property, Samhir Vasdev (COL ’11), said maintenance and repair issues have been a big problem.
“The worst part … is the maintenance … they do a lot of big transition things that I feel like I should know about and they don’t talk to me about it,” he said.
Vasdev recalled that one Friday afternoon, he and his roommates returned to their West Georgetown townhouse to find that the back wall behind the house had been demolished and that the inside walls had been shaved down, leaving a fine layer of dust over their belongings. None of the renters had been contacted about the changes.
To help students deal with the challenges of living outside the gates, Georgetown has set up two separate offices: the Office of Off-Campus Housing and the Office of Off-Campus Student Life.
The Office of Off-Campus Housing’s main function is to aid students with finding a place to live. Its website offers housing forms, recycling and trash information, tips for moving in and out, housing listings, and a roommate finder service.
But most students are not aware of the services Off-Campus Housing offers. None of the students contacted for this article had ever heard of “OCH 101,” the department’s housing database.
OCSL offers numerous resources to help students avoid the pitfalls of renting, including information on renter’s rights and fire safety. Most students know the office only in a punitive capacity, however. OCSL runs the Student Neighborhood Assistance Program, a University neighborhood patrol initiative, which can cite students for things like noise and trash violations.
OCSL also makes an effort to maintain friendly relations with neighborhood residents not affiliated with the University. On a page entitled “Being Good Neighbors,” the website claims that Georgetown leads D.C. universities in on-campus housing, with 78 percent of students living within the gates.
The fact that so many undergraduates are living outside the gates is a point of contention for many Georgetown residents not affiliated with the University. Claiming that a lack of on-campus housing options is forcing students to move into Burleith and West Georgetown, many neighbors feel that enrollment is already at an unacceptably high level and that the University should be forced to accept fewer students in order to accommodate a higher percentage of students on campus.
This view was most famously espoused by Stephen Brown, a Burlieth resident who outraged students last year by publishing photographs and addresses of student parties on his website, drunkengeorgetownstudents.com.
But Brown claims that his real complaint is not with student partygoers, but with the University’s failure to provide enough on-campus housing.
“We’re more on the student side than you can imagine,” he said.  “I think the University likes to pit the neighbors versus the students.  It’s really not neighbors versus students, it’s neighbors versus the university … I mean, they’re inviting you to Washington, but they’re not giving you a place to live.”
It seems unlikely that Georgetown will expand its on-campus housing options in the near future. The 2010 Campus Plan submitted by the University to the D.C. Zoning Commission in December originally contained a proposal to house graduate students and faculty in a “1789 Block” between 37th and 36th Streets, but the plan was nixed in the face of opposition from neighborhood groups like the Advisory Neighborhood Commission. Without additional housing, the only way to keep students on campus would be to drop enrollment—an unattractive proposition when operating budgets are stretched thin, and one the University has not proposed.
But even if the University provided adequate housing for all of its students, some upperclassmen might still choose to live off-campus. To many, not living on campus means less University supervision and regulation.
According to Campus Housing’s website, living in a University townhouse costs $8,194 per year—$910 per month. While that’s cheaper than typical off-campus rents, some students are willing to pay more to be free from Georgetown’s alcohol policies and rules.
“It’s just nice not having to deal with RAs and stuff like that,” Dimon said. “[It’s] a good sense of independence.”
Living off campus is not cheap, but findmyhousing.com, a website founded by Mike Stone (MSB ’10) and Peter Swiek (MSB ’10) during their time at Georgetown, offers a solution to help students get the best value for their money. The site, now managed by Swiek, Michael Crouch (MSB ’13), Joe Friedrich (MSB’13) and Harrison Beecher (COL’10), offers a map-based search tool for houses in the Georgetown area. It is free for landlords and students, and it gives previous renters the chance to rate houses based on value, condition, location, neighbors and landlord and to review the houses in a section of the site that landlords can’t see.
According to Swiek, Find My Housing is working with the Georgetown University Student Associaton and Georgetown officials with the goal of bringing the site to Georgetown “in an official capacity.”
“The ‘Directory’ is a combination of Amazon reviews and Wikipedia,” he wrote in an email. “The whole website is a place [where] students and landlords can connect and benefit from a centralized and standardized off-campus housing resource.”
The D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs also offers tools to help renters, providing free inspections to ensure that houses are safe and inhabitable.  OCSL and OCH recommend that students request inspections for their houses, but the examinations can have negative repercussions for the landlord-student tenant relationship.
“My landlord felt attacked,” Grace Kane (COL ’11) said, explaining that her landlord reacted with anger at her request for a DCRA inspection. “Our relationship turned from not great to pretty bad after this happened—even after I explained profusely that our administrators advocate relentlessly [for inspections].”
She and her roommates ended up having to pay for the damages noted in the report themselves, since their landlord claimed they had caused them, and they were subjected to “random weekly inspections” from that point on.
In order to avoid issues with their landlord, Dimon and her roommates took detailed pictures of their house before they moved in this year in order to protect their security deposit.
There are resources for renters who search them out. In particular, many students do not know that is illegal for a landlord to insist upon being paid more than one month’s rent at a time. The Housing Code is available online in a searchable format, but for those who find it too daunting, the OCSL, OCH and the DCRA are all available to help explain what renter’s rights are and how they can be enforced.
Dimon recommended that potential renters choose a landlord who has only one property, since these landlords have a vested interest in their properties.
“My advice is to try to know your rights and be persistent,” Dimon said.