Recap of last night’s Ten Year Plan meeting on housing, enrollment, and off-campus life
Posted by: Molly Redden in News, Vox Populi, tags: 2010 Campus Plan, Enrollment, Georgetown, Housing, Off-Campus Housing, Town-Gown Relations
GU’s Charles DeSantisOn Tuesday night, University officials revealed their tentative plans for the future of enrollment, student housing, and off-campus life at Georgetown to an audience of about forty West Georgetown and Burleith residents. It was the first in a series of community meetings designed to give neighborhood residents an idea of what its Ten Year Plan will look like.
Emphasizing that the plans shown last night were part of the unfinalized “draft plan,” the Georgetown administrators said the University intends to cap its undergraduate enrollment at its current level of just over 6,000 and instead increase enrollment in its graduate programs from 5,512 to about 8,700 in the next ten years.
The presentation of the plan was accompanied by several University pledges to improve the quality of life for neighbors living near campus who often complain about student noise, parties, and trash. Beginning in August of 2010, Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson said, the University will place an adult “Community Advisor” in both West Georgetown and Burleith to act as the equivalent of ResLife Hall Directors among upperclassmen living in those areas. Because Georgetown does not own housing in the Burleith neighborhood, Olson said after the meeting that the University will rent a house for the Community Advisor to live in.
While it is unclear whether the creation of the Community Advisor positions came at the request of neighborhood residents, last week, the results of a Voice FOIA request revealed that community leaders have been lobbying the University to place “adult live-in supervision” among students who live outside of Georgetown’s gates.
Starting in January of 2010, the University will also double the number of SNAP patrols which rove surrounding neighborhoods and break up parties from one to two patrol cars on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. This coming summer, the University will also run the SNAP program with one car on the same nights, which it has not done in previous summers.
Although residents had expressed a strong desire to see more on-campus undergraduate housing built in the next ten years at a previous Campus Plan meeting held in May, the draft plan, which was presented by Olson, Associate Vice President for External Relations Linda Greenan, and Charles DeSantis, who will oversee the Ten Year Plan’s development, does not include any plans for more undergraduate housing to be built on campus. This particularly surprised and incensed neighbors who had been at the May meeting, where the firm Georgetown had contracted to help design the plan, Cooper, Robertson & Partners, showed that there were many sites on Georgetown’s campus where it could add up to 800 beds (in addition to its current 5,053 beds).
With the exception of Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Aaron Golds (COL `11) and GUSA Communications Director Molly Breen (MSB `10), no students attended the meeting.
Voice News will have additional coverage of this meeting and student and community reactions to it in tomorrow’s paper.
Photo by Danna Khabbaz.
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“…the University will rent a house for the Community Advisor to live in.”
I pay 1100 a month. No house in Burleith is smaller than four people? So let’s say $5K a month including utilities. So $60,000 a year, at a minimum? Damn. And they’d probably get one on the nicer side, so could be even more. What if we just made it rain from the roof of Duke Ellington? Cause that might be more worthwhile.
They’ll act as the “equivalent of hall directors”? How is that plausible? Or to the extent that they can act as a normative check on students’ behavior, even legal? Maybe the Code of Conduct can be amended to reflect this jurisdictional mission creep, but I’m going to have to side with the neighbors on this one. If you want to maintain control over student behavior, yer gonna hafta do it south of Reservoir Road.
Lastly, a public thank you from our house for SNAPS. We party. When SNAPS comes, we know it would otherwise be Metro. And they make it rain too, with 61D’s. Neighbors, kudos on that move. You know we know that criminal records (can) ruin careers. Low blow, but effective. But really, low blow. So thanks for calling SNAPS first. And thanks, University, for running it more often.
I have to agree with the neighbors here: I would love to see more on-campus housing.
Georgetown does a pretty terrible job of keeping the community vibe going after freshmen year — compared to places like Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Princeton, with residential-type clusters for all four years.
Even some decent Henle-type clusters (without the maddeningly ugly style of the buildings) would do a lot … AND keep the students out of the neighbors hair. It’s a win-win.
Based on the information received so far regarding the 10 year plan- GU is looking only at the revenue side and not seriously considering the collateral damage it will leave in its wake. It is a lose-lose scenario for both students and neighbors. GU needs to do a better job of taking care of its current customers/students with more beds on-campus, security cameras, dealing with slumlords, high possibility of getting an arrest record for having a party, etc… The community is completely oversaturated with traffic, lawlessness, and constantly trying to deal with those that choose to behave in an unbecoming manner. GU needs to stop looking looking at the revenue sheets in front of them and should start developing a plan that is a winning scenario of everyone. Isn’t the “its all about me” attitude getting a little old by now? Come on GU!
How about starting with this-
GU needs to quit hiding behind its Office of External Relations and OCSL staff and deal with the problem head on and as a honest broker from the Office of the President. The President’s radio comment a few months ago stating that relations were good between the community and the university is either naive or a misrepresentation. It is time to become part of the solution.
GU needs to invest into housing that is inside the GATES (not on the edge of the community boundary). GU needs to provide a learning and living scenario that provides the students with a safer and overall better learning environment. The rental slumhouses in the community are a very very bad scenario for the students. As beds become more scarce on campus, the slumlords will be more than willing to maximize their revenue from the wallets of the students (or their parents).
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