Posts Tagged “Magis Row”

As promised yesterday in a press conference, ANC 2E finally released the full details of the provisions in the Campus Plan. University officials and neighborhood leaders have ruminated over these “proposed conditions” since negotiations restarted in early April. Both parties responded with an extremely satisfied view on the result. ”I am confident that this agreement represents the interests of our entire community and aligns our long-term strategic plans with the goals of our growing city,” President John DeGioia said yesterday in an email to the Georgetown community.

Not all students reacted to the agreement with as much excitement as the Mayor and President DeGioia. “Particularly promising in this agreement is the stated desire by both sides to make campus a more lively and social place … That said, they are certainly elements of the agreement I found troublesome … Students are full members of society and they should not have their ability to freely choose housing redistricted. The complete ban of student cars from the neighborhood also strikes me as unfairly discriminatory,” ANC Commissioner Jake Sticka (COL ’13) said in an email to Vox.

Earlier today we brought you a few highlights from the recently released provisions on the Campus Plan. Now we’re giving you the full breakdown: from housing to food trucks to the satellite campus. Enjoy.

Full list after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments 15 Comments »

Earlier today, ANC 2E released the revised 2010 Campus Plan. The move follows yesterday afternoon’s jubilant announcement of a finalized plan, along with the creation of a new Georgetown Community Partnership between the university and its neighbors. It also comes in advance of a special public meeting scheduled for Thursday, June 14 at 6:30 p.m. to discuss the proposed revisions.

One of the biggest revelations of the 10-year plan is that, well, it’s no longer a 10-year plan. Instead, the plan runs for seven years, beginning retroactively on January 1, 2011 and ending on December 31, 2017. During that time frame, both sides hope to reach a consensus on a new plan that will hold for 20 years thereafter.

Some Highlights

  • Students living in Magis Row townhouses will move on campus by Fall 2013. These residences will become faculty and staff housing.
  • Off-campus living to be treated as a “privilege, not a right.”
  • An additional 450 beds will be added on campus.
  • Undergraduate enrollment will remain capped at 6,675.
  • By Fall of 2025, 90 percent of students will live on campus.
  • Georgetown agrees to discourage students from bringing cars to campus.

Full PDFs of both documents are after the jump. Look for more analysis from Vox on the plan’s consequences later this evening.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments 15 Comments »

The new residents of Magis Row have been chosen. Next school year, the bloc of fourteen University townhouses that Georgetown converted into living and learning communities in an attempt to mollify town-gown tensions (and incidentally, they haven’t) will be occupied by the following fourteen themed communities:

  • Hip Hop Justified
  • Nobody Home
  • Catholic Social Teaching
  • Justice and Diversity in Action
  • Green House
  • Women and Spirituality
  • CLAIM Georgetown
  • Destination DC: Our City Beyond the Hilltop
  • peace.love.frisbee.
  • Las Casita
  • Women With and For Others
  • The Melting Pot
  • Cura Personalis

Like this years’ houses, many of the themes fall into two categories: inscrutable names (Nobody Home and peace.love.frisbee) and combinations of Georgtown’s favorite words, like justice, diversity, cura personalis, spirituality, and ‘for others’ (although there aren’t as many of these as there were last year).

The list, which was given to Vox by Assistant Director of ResLife Katie Heather, appears to have a few holdovers from this year. It’s not clear whether their residents are the same, but Hip Hop Justified, Nobody Home, Green House, and Justice and Diversity in Action were all Magis Row themes last year.

Photo from Flickr user dclock.

Comments 5 Comments »

Townhouses

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments 20 Comments »

Town-GownThe eternal conflict: curmudgeonly neighbors v. rowdy co-eds

With new neighbors’ groups popping up left and right, it looks like we’re in for another year of fights between residents and the University.  But Georgetown’s not the only school dealing with a seemingly perpetual town-gown rift—as an article in yesterday’s Washington Post makes clear, other local colleges are also plagued by conflicts over students living off-campus.

So what exactly are our nearby peers dealing with?

At Catholic, neighbors are pressuring the Metropolitan Police Department to enact a zero tolerance policy for disorderly conduct.  For UMD-College Park, a recent debate about whether to maintain rent control for single-family houses turned into a fight over whether or not students should be living off-campus.

Permanent residents can make trouble for administrators as well as students, the article points out, by leveraging their power over zoning and construction issues to pressure schools.  For example, in 2001, GWU was not allowed to increase enrollment or begin new construction projects until it started housing at least 70% of its students on-campus.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments No Comments »

Mages Row

If you, like me, had an application to live in a themed townhouse on Magis Row rejected, you might have assumed the other, winning applications were much more exciting and creative. Hardly! As the list of townhouse themes (after the jump) shows, they were just lucky enough to fall into one of two surefire categories.

The first genre of Magis Row house is “Wha-?”.  Their names–Nobody Home, Hip Hop Justified–only give a vague idea of what they’re about. These are fine because Nobody Home sounds like a house full of Boo Radleys

The other kind of Magis Row house is created by printing a list of Georgetown’s favorite words–justice, interfaith, global–and pasting those words on top of one another like a ransom note. I’m looking at you, Global Health Awareness and Activism Project.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments 5 Comments »

Magus Row

Next year, Georgetown students will be able to live in townhouses with people who share their interests in a living and learning community called Magis Row:

YOU will have the opportunity to create and live within a community of Georgetown students who share your passions and interests! Magis Row, formerly known as the townhouses on the 1400 block of 36th Street between O and P Streets, will be transformed into a village of individually themed communities consisting of students who are actively committed to their passions and ideals and want to do more!

That’s not as clear as it could be, but the deal is four people into the same sort of thing could live together and work on that thing together. The site offers sustainable living as a possible common interest, which is ripe with Biodome potential. Other common interests, like politics, offer great odd couple possibilities.

Magis Row looks like a nice idea from Georgetown that should make student life more interesting. The caveat is that some activities on the Row sound like living an entire year trapped in New Student Orientation (discuss a book, tour Georgetown with a Jesuit).

Conspiracy theories, after the jump

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments 4 Comments »