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.

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GUSA, protecting students from tyranical landlords

RATE MY LANDLORD?: During the Executive Briefing, GUSA Vice President Jason Kluger (MSB ’11) announced that  the executive wants to tackle the “lack of readily available information” about off-campus student housing. He said there is no official name yet, but the executive wants to create a “Rate my Landlord”-type website to help students with housing.

“It’s miserable, and it’s hard to get a house, and you always feel like you’re getting gypped, and you always feel like there’s so much pressure … Georgetown students are going to get screwed,” Kluger said. “So it’s just another initiative to get more information on it… for kids to know their options so they don’t have to pay as much as they think they might.”

In the rest of his briefing, Kluger mentioned that the executive should be part of an upcoming discussion with the administration about the main campus plan. He also updated the Senate on the free newspaper program.

HATE CRIMES AND THE STUDENT CODE OF CONDUCT: Senator Josh Mogil (SFS ‘11—Off Campus) introduced a resolution to start a discussion about updating the Student Code of Conduct.

Mogil wants to make hate crimes—“crimes motivated by race, disability, gender, gender identified, ethnicity, and/or sexual orientation”—a separate offense under category C.

Currently, bias-related incidents are only treated as parameters of other category C violations, but Mogil seeks to make them their own category of offense, and include in the definition of “bias-related incidents” those that are motivated by disability or physical handicap.

“It sends a message because I was a victim [of a hate crime,] and I couldn’t do certain things within the School Code of Conduct,” Mogil said. “I couldn’t face my attacker because it wasn’t its own thing. It was only a parameter. So it still isn’t treated as seriously. I was a victim of assault.”

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