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Whether or not it turns out that Georgetown could have prevented Sunday night’s fire in New South, it’ll probably irk at least a few residents to learn that Georgetown just made U.S. News & World Report’s list of “10 Schools With Pricey Dorms.”

When University officials spoke to neighbors in May and raised the possibility of building a new housing complex on the “1789 Block” (the area between Prospect and N Streets and 36th and 37th Streets), neighbors said they didn’t want to see undergraduates living in that area. So the University decided the new residences would be for grad students and faculty.  When officials at the May meeting said they were hoping to put 200 to 250 beds in the complex, neighbors said that would be too much density.  So the University lowered the projected number of beds to 120.

Even with the concessions, though, neighbors still aren’t enthusiastic about the proposal, which was presented Monday night by University Architect Alan Brangman.  While there were some quibbles about the specifics of the plan, most of the objections stem from one essential conflict: many neighbors don’t believe the land the University owns outside the front gates counts as “on campus;” University officials do.  And so does D.C.: Georgetown University’s legal boundaries, as defined by the the National Capital Planning Commission, include portions of four blocks West of the front gates.

“It’s a misnomer and it’s a deception,” one neighbor said of the University’s practice of defining the campus as including these areas beyond the front gates. “They [the students] are living amongst us!  They’re on the left of us, in the front of us, on the side of us, and they’re in the back of us … They’re not really within your gates, although you’re hiding behind the fact that [the boundaries were] approved.”

Brangman was having none of it, though.

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It’s never too early to invest in your dream house!

If dorm living’s got you down and you’ve heard the horror stories about local landlords, the Washington Times has a new solution for you: go buy a house (or, more precisely, go get your parents to buy one for you).

The Times ran a whole feature story on the new trend of parents buying homes for their college-age kids to live in while they’re at school.  While buying a house seems like a drastic step, the article explains that with the rent and dorm prices rising and the housing market in shambles, buying a house and selling it off or renting it out to other students after graduation often makes financial sense.

While the phenomenon is most widespread in the Midwest where real estate is the cheapest, but it’s also gaining ground here in D.C.  The article features one real estate agent who sells as many as eight houses per year to Georgetown and GW students.  The piece also profiles recent Georgetown Law grad Jim Pyle, whose mother bought him a house on Capitol Hill which they sold for about $200,000 more than they paid.

GU’s Charles DeSantis

On 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.

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While Georgetown is currently tackling the issue of gender neutral bathrooms, Syracuse and Princeton are taking it a step further by beginning to offer gender-neutral housing.

Both universities decided that next fall, they will allow students to room with someone of the opposite sex.  The policies were changed with LGBT students in mind, but will also help other students who want to live with their friends of different genders.

Syracuse will offer seventy-four two-bedroom suites for students that don’t feel comfortable entering the housing lottery with roommates of the same gender. They will also be giving training for potential mixed gender pairings for conflicts that are nonexistent with same gender housing.

Princeton will be allowing Spelman Hall, a residence hall featuring apartment-style suites, to offer gender-neutral housing.

When Georgetown announced plans to establish Magis Row, the block of 16 townhouses designated for living and learning communities that sit on the only strip of University property facing residential homes, the Voice editorial board and many students instantly suspected that Magis Row was appeasement for neighbors frustrated by student trash and noise.

A set of e-mails that the Voice obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Magis Row’s establishment followed months of meetings between University administrators and community leaders in which the leaders tried to effect changes in student housing.  They also show that neighbors hope the University will turn more student housing outside the front gates into LLCs, too.

The FOIA request, which the Voice filed in March, obtained e-mails sent between Citizens’ Association of Georgetown directors and officers and members of Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E. Before submitting the results, the ANC redacted some street names and the names of the CAG members and ANC commissioners who sent and received the e-mails. Ron Lewis, the chair of ANC 2E, wrote in a letter accompanying the FOIA requests that redactions were made according to advice from the D.C. government.

Although it is unclear when the University or neighbors conceived of Magis Row, a September 1 e-mail indicates that neighborhood had long been trying to influence the makeup of student housing outside Georgetown’s gates, and the Georgetown had been attentive to their complaints.

“We have been in monthly meetings to discuss numerous student issues that effect the whole of Georgetown,” the sender wrote. The sender added that with regards to an unspecified block of academic housing which had been designated as normal student housing for that year, “We have solid commitments that that will change in the 2009 academic year.”

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Malin Hu admitted that Georgetown actually gives her the warm fuzzies.

Erica Slates thought GUSA could really use some proofreading lessons.

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The University is formulating its 2010 Campus Plan, which, once it passes ANC and D.C. Zoning Commission muster, will dictate how the University can expand over the next decade. Previous Campus Plans excluded neighborhood input in their planning stages, much to the neighbors’ dismay. So this summer, University officials will hold a series of meetings to gather community input. For those of you who aren’t here, Vox will be attending all meetings and recapping them here on the blog. Keep in mind that the proposals under discussion are only tentative. At the same time, they do comprise, as University architect Alan Brangman told Vox, Georgetown University’s “wishlist.”

On Sunday, Molly Redden offered an overview of Saturday’s six-hour-long community meeting (yes, we stayed the whole time, and not just for the paltry cold cuts lunch buffet). The first part of the meeting, in which the campus plan’s architects from Cooper, Robertson & Partners presented their overview of possible options for campus development, went rather smoothly and quite quickly. But only because most of the attendees were champing at the bit to get to the next, and last, item on the meeting’s agenda: the open discussion.

Having attended a community meeting before, in which “open discussion” was the only agenda, I steeled myself for a long afternoon of student berating. There was, in fact, less than I expected—as Molly will cover on Thursday, Georgetown neighbors spent as much time hammering the University on the “adverse impact” of the traffic it draws to the area as they did bemoaning the students’ day-to-day drunkenness, noisiness, littering and general lack of consideration for others.

University architect Alan Brangman kicked off the discussion with a presentation of the University’s physical boundaries, which were set in 1966 by the National Capital Planning Commission. Brangman had a brief tiff with one of the neighbors over boundary lines, specifically regarding the houses on the 36th Street between O and P Streets and the 3500 block of Prospect Street, which Georgetown acquired after boundaries were set. The houses’ backyards fall within University property lines—the houses themselves do not.

The houses, however, are considered on-campus, or at least their beds are included in the on-campus bed count. The neighbor took issue with this tactic, because he and his fellow community members consider the houses off-campus. Essentially, they are unsettled by the “gray area” surrounding Georgetown’s loose definition of on-campus beds—if the University can buy up houses outside the property lines and count them as on-campus, what’s to stop it from encroaching further into the neighborhood?

The question is a valid one. While Georgetown hasn’t expanded much more into the neighborhood, Associate Vice President for External Relations Linda Greenan said that when houses come up for sale, often the University takes a look at them, adding for reassurance, perhaps: “and often we don’t buy them.”

Nevertheless, Georgetown and the community members seem to be at an impasse. Brangman said that currently there are no plans to change the “on-campus” status of the disputed student townhouses. In a particularly heated moment, a neighbor offered Brangman the analogy: “Just because [you] own a gun doesn’t mean you can shoot me.”

“But I might,” Brangman said.

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The thieving nine!

Housing teases again. This time, they accidentally amped up the selection numbers of nine students hoping to live in Georgetown suites and apartments. The students were freshmen in the SNHS, a two-year nursing program, and their enrollment in this program caused Housing to rank them as if they were in the class of 2010.

Upon discovering the error, Housing emailed (full text after the jump) everyone in the class of 2012 vying for an apartment to tell them that they’d compensated by docking the selection numbers of the groups the SNHS belonged to. They’re also expanding the ‘housing market’ by making “additional apartments/suites available.” Where did they get those?

Aside from procuring extra housing as if by magic, not all students are enamored of the adjusted rankings. Jacqueline Wright (COL `12), who is in a group with an SNHS student, saw her number adjusted from 18 to 78.

“We were reported. We saw the email someone sent to Housing reporting that [an SNHS student] was in our group, but I’m not sure if the people who weren’t directly reported were moved back,” Wright said.

We’re not sure either, so we’ll let you know when we hear back from Housing. That might take a while, given that they appear to Wright to be overwhelmed.

“I guess they were swamped with emails,”  she said. “Housing was great through all of this. They were very reasonable, I guess a lot of people were harassing the office.”

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With millions expected for Obama’s inauguration and every hotel from here to West Virginia booked, everyone in D.C. has been going sublet-crazy (Yes we can price gouge!). Everyone, that is, except college students. But Georgetown hadn’t defined any guest policy so there was an outside chance students would be able to get Craigslist-brokered riches after all.

Well Campus Housing finally sent out their policies for inauguration weekend and no such luck. Here are the important points from the killjoy email:

• “Student are not permitted to sublease or rent their residence at any time.”

• “Students must pre-register guests … Requests are due by 10 am Monday, January 12, 2009.”

• “Residents will be permitted to host two students each.”

• “Guests may not sleep in common spaces or hallways.”

• “If your guests plan to drive to campus, please be aware that there will be a fee for parking on the weekend through Tuesday, January 20, 2009.”

• “We wanted to take a moment to remind you that in the interest of safety issues, we reserve the right to limit the number of parties in a given area.”

Yes, you can’t.