Elections are tomorrow, and Vox is providing you today with a series on every dorm’s GUSA candidates. For off-campus representation, three senators are running for five available spots.

Aziz Saqr (NHS ’16): Give us water fountains or give us death

Saqr, a human science major, is running to be GUSA off-campus Senator. The first issue he will address if elected is to add water fountains to the new science building. His main concern would be representing off-campus students’ interests in GUSA.

“I will attempt to work as a connection between on-campus and off-campus students,” he said. “Off-campus students are my priority.”

Aziz sees the fact that he is a freshman living off-campus as an advantage, as most of his friends live on campus. With this he says he can better bridge the two student populations.

Another advantage he says he has over other candidates is his prior student government experience. He participated in student council from eighth grade though senior year. He was successful in getting a student lounge and a senior skip-day. At Georgetown, he hopes to further students’ connection with the school by opening Healy Tower for tours.

His years in student council have also taught him lessons he can use in GUSA.

“Through my years in student council, I’ve realized that the only way to please a majority is through communication and making sure their issues are properly and diligently resolved,” he said.

Aziz is also confident in his ability to present possible changes to the school and argue in favor of them, which will enable him to better represent off-campus students.

“I feel that I have great ideas to bring to the table and I hope to get… off-campus students’ words out,” he said.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Last Sunday, a Burleith resident put up the sign pictured to the right in this post on the intersection of 36th and S st. The sign is a notification that a bus service led by the Student Neighborhood Assistance Program has now moved to another stop on Reservoir and 37th Street.

Later that evening, a S.N.A.P. employee confirmed that the sign was in fact not affiliated with the program and immediately went to investigate. He added that the sign presented a potential safety concern for students who may confuse it with the Safe Rides shuttle that escorts students in West Georgetown and Burleith at late hours of the night.

In an email to Vox, Stacy Kerr, Assistant Vice President for Communications, confirmed today that the sign was not put up or authorized by the University. She also echoed a similar sentiment that is troubling all parties involved (except for, apparently, this neighbor): what is a S.N.A.P. “bus”? Well, to our knowledge, it doesn’t exist.

Vox suspects this is where Stan Shunpike picks up passengers of the Knight Bus.  We’ll probably be standing there around midnight, wands in hand, expecting a triple decker, purple public transportation bus to come hurtling at us stranded members of the wizarding community.

Photo: Jake Schindler

In effort to improve town-gown relations and to provide information for students sub-letting houses and apartments in surrounding neighborhoods, Georgetown University will be publishing two lists, naming the landlords that they would recommend students to sublet from, and the landlords they would not recommend.

“We’re promoting good landlords to [students] and provide resources to them so they know the rights they have as a tenant and the expectations they should seek,” Vice President of Communications Stacy Kerr said.

Letters are being sent to landlords around the area, encouraging them to pledge their commitment to “maintaining the quality of life in our community to your neighbors publicly.” In return, the University would promote these landlords to students by publishing the names of landlords who sign the pledge on their website.

On the other hand, landlords and properties that receive multiple and unresolved “credible complaints” would be published on the a “List of Properties of Concern.” Credible complaints would include shoveling sidewalks or trash issues, said Kerr, but would not include complaints that a house is too noisy.

The letter to the landlords and pledge are included after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »

As we’ve previously reported, the Office of Planning recently filed its report to the DC Zoning Commission regarding Georgetown University’s 2010 campus plan. While the report ultimately recommends that the plan be approved, it sharply criticizes certain aspects of the campus plan in a similar manner to the recommendation filed by ANC 2E earlier this year.

The report proposes several restrictions on the University in order for the plan to be approved, most notably:

• On-campus housing: Most infamously, the report proposes that the University provide on-campus housing for 90% of traditional undergraduates by 2015 and 100% by 2016. If the University hasn’t accomplished this by 2016, it would be forced to cut undergraduate enrollment by a quarter of the difference between the number of students and the number of beds until housing was provided for all students.

  While the OP concedes that Georgetown houses a greater percentage of students than most universities in the district, it states that “many universities of competitive standard to Georgetown house 100% of their students on campus [including] Harvard, MIT and Princeton.” Of course, these schools’ endowments respectively total $27.4, $8.3, and $14.4 billion compared to Georgetown’s $1.01 billion, and each of them have substantially larger campuses than Georgetown. The report justifies the restrictions by stating that “housing one hundred percent of the undergraduate students on campus has been found to be the most effective means of controlling student behavior.” Read the rest of this entry »

Update: The full report of the Office of Planning is now available after the jump.

The District Office of Planning filed its report to the D.C. Zoning Commission today, recommending that Georgetown University house 100 percent of its traditional undergraduate students on-campus by the fall of 2016, according to the Georgetown Dish.

The Office of Planning recommends that the University accomplish this by “incrementally reducing the [traditional undergraduate student] enrollment […] until the TUS enrollment equals the university-provided housing.” The report obtained by the Dish stated concerns about the “adverse impact and objectionable conditions due to the number of students” in Burleith and West Georgetown.

Unsurprisingly, Advisory Neighborhood Commission chair Ron Lewis told the Dish, “This is a strong, thoughtful, well-documented report.”

This outcome seems to support Georgetown Metropolitan writer Topher Matthews’s theory that the University made last-ditch changes to the plan—including the addition of 250 beds on-campus and reducing the total student cap from 16,133 to 15,000—in an attempt to win over the Office of Planning, and by extension, the Zoning Commission.

If so, it didn’t work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, we ran a post about the general sentiment that the Citizens Association of Georgetown and residents feel toward the 2010 Campus Plan draft that the University presented in November, as shown in the first public meeting about the plan ever to discuss a coherent strategy to combat it.

For the sake of brevity—and it was still kind of a monster post—we isolated a presentation that CAG Vice President Gianluca Pivato, of “fuck off” fame, gave about the information CAG compiled when it researched the impact of students on the neighborhood.

It’s town-gown tensions by the numbers.

Pivato demonstrated the impact students living in Georgetown and Burleith have had on the neighborhood in terms of the space they take up, the trash they generate, and the 911 calls and arrests they invite. Pivato was clearly going for shock factor, and he got it, most of all with a Google Map which boasted a red marker for every undergraduate household in Burleith and Georgetown, and a blue one for every graduate student household. With more than 400 markers total appearing on the screen, the map elicited a gasp from the audience.

According to Pivato, who based his numbers on what seemed like thorough research through neighborhood listservs and city-reported statistics, the neighborhoods around the University could be described in terms of …

… the number of students currently living in Burleith and West and East Georgetown, and the number of houses they occupy. Currently, 1,109 graduate students live in the area, and Pivato and his team were able to confirm that they live in at least 79 houses, which they except to rise to at least 124 houses when their enrollment numbers increase. “[This] will considerable displace undergraduates” further into the community, he said. Undergraduates living in Georgetown and Burleith number 1,305 and occupy over 350 houses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the D.C. Department of Consumer Regulatory Affairs mailed letters to over 125 Georgetown University-area landlords it believes are renting properties without a valid business license. The letters issue an ultimatum: apply for a business license and have their properties inspected within 10 days, or DCRA will take “enforcement action.”

The DCRA has intensified its focus on policing university-area property owners since it launched the Collegiate Off-Campus Housing Initiative last Fall. When the school year began in 2009, it launched a website for student renters in the District, ThisShouldBeIllegal.com, a Twitter feed, and a Facebook page all aimed at helping students determine whether their landlords were properly licensed to rent to them.

Voice News will have more information on Thursday.

Photo from the Collegiate Off-Campus Housing Initiative’s Facebook.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »