Impasse holds on GU campus plan

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Photo by Bill Petros/Current File Photo

Plans for new facilities at Georgetown University Hospital are one of the sticking points.

By Carol Buckley,  Current Staff Writer . . .

Georgetown University officials and neighborhood leaders squared off last week to reprise now-familiar arguments over the school’s recently filed campus plan.

A crowd filed into the auditorium at Duke Ellington School of the Arts Thursday evening to offer opinions to advisory neighborhood commissioners, who were flanked on the stage by university representatives and leaders of community associations in the Georgetown, Burleith, Foxhall and Hillandale neighborhoods.

The neighborhood commission, which is accorded great weight in city processes, will take a position on the plan at its next meeting. Barring any huge surprises between now and then, all commissioners save one -- student representative Jake Sticka -- are expected to oppose the document, which outlines the school’s growth over the next decade.

Debate centered on the predictable hot topics: housing and student conduct. But the evening also revealed a surprising number of unanswered questions as the university and neighbors prepare for April’s zoning hearing on the campus plan.

The most significant of those up-in-the-air issues is a longstanding question mark: Georgetown University Hospital, which the campus plan now subjects to a phased renovation that neighbors worry would lead to years of construction noise and traffic disruption.

But university representative Spiros Dimolitsas confirmed that the school and hospital operator MedStar have been in talks to find a new site for the hospital. Georgetown will work to amend the filed plan if an agreement is reached to build a new facility in one go, he added.

Dimolitsas fueled speculation that the on-campus North Kehoe field is the front-runner location for a new hospital; he said planners have considered whether a medical facility there would make it difficult to route a proposed “loop” road along the western edge of campus, but added that “we don’t think it would be a problem.”

But if the field is available for a new hospital, why can’t it host a new dormitory now, wondered some neighbors at the meeting. Other residents have hoped along the way that the current hospital site could hold dorms once a new hospital is built.

But that’s years away, pointed out commissioner Tom Birch. “To hang our hopes in this plan” that the fate of the hospital will fix housing is a “sorry fiction,” he said.

Transportation issues are another blind spot in the town-gown debate surrounding the plan. University official Karen Frank said traffic consultants have issued a preliminary plan and are working on updates now.

With a proposed increase of 2,100 graduate students -- although some will likely use satellite locations -- the current traffic scenario is likely to change over the next decade. Although the campus plan calls for more bicycle facilities and encourages ride-sharing, the simultaneous proposal for an additional 1,000 parking spots -- 750 for the hospital, 250 for the school -- will counter those efforts, said resident Topher Mathews, author of neighborhood blog Georgetown Metropolitan.

“New parking spaces will draw more drivers,” he said at the meeting.

Neighbors and university representatives also sparred over the proposed one-way loop road -- a low-boil issue that has gained momentum since the plan’s filing. The road, now used only by service vehicles, would route university buses from the Canal Road entrance through campus and back again. It would skirt Glover Archbold Park on the western edge of campus.

Foxhall advisory neighborhood commissioner Kent Slowinski noted that the existing service road has collapsed before and can’t support buses or school shuttles. A landscape architect, Slowinski added that he had developed two alternatives to the road that would allow buses to turn around within campus.

But the crucial objection -- that the road would be on a scenic easement established by the National Park Service in 2003 and would therefore violate that agreement -- is unfounded, said the university’s Frank.

“The road is not on the scenic easement at all,” she said.

But transportation issues and the hospital’s location were only bookends to the night’s main event: the dispute about undergraduate housing.

Georgetown University students made a strong showing Thursday to voice support for the plan, with one undergraduate offering a petition with more than 700 signatories -- few of whom, however, are identified as District residents.

The turnout perhaps reflected an ever-more-heated debate that has raged online since the campus plan was filed. Students have marveled at neighbors who move close to a university but complain about student behavior, and ad hominem attacks on local activists have increased. Neighbors have also taken to the virtual fora, often tarring the student population with one brush as loud, dirty and drunken.

Dialogue was more civil Thursday, with a few residents noting that they welcome living close to some undergraduate renters -- but the concentration has grown too great, they argued.

The two years of discussions that preceded the campus plan were awash in data from the school and residents supporting their positions. Thursday, neighborhood activists offered new figures as a challenge to the university’s claim that it’s doing a good job housing undergraduates on campus.

According to school officials, more than 80 percent of undergraduates live on campus -- more than any D.C. university save Gallaudet. But citizen groups passed out a tally Thursday that questioned that statistic; if the housing percentage is calculated using the higher total undergraduate enrollment -- including older and continuing studies students, rather than just “traditional” students -- the school houses 67 percent of its undergrads.

And Georgetown and Burleith are different from most areas surrounding D.C. schools, say neighbors. In both historic neighborhoods, an increase in student residents leads to more homes becoming group rentals. In other spots, apartment buildings can absorb extra demand.

At American University, for example, where officials are aiming to add hundreds of new beds on-campus, about 1,100 undergraduates now live off-campus but in the surrounding neighborhood. Of those, according to university figures, more than 600 live in two large apartment buildings on Massachusetts Avenue.

Group homes, which neighbors say generate the bulk of trash and noise complaints, are also less common at the Ward 3 school. American has identified 47 homes in several surrounding neighborhoods as group homes rented by undergraduates.

In Georgetown and Burleith -- where a roughly similar number of undergraduates live -- neighbors opposing the campus plan have counted 230 properties used as group rentals by graduate and undergraduate students. Of those, the most densely packed homes house undergraduates.

According to university figures, about 60 percent of undergraduates living in Burleith and 45 percent of those in West Georgetown live in homes that house four students or more. For graduate students, about 30 percent in Burleith live with three or more roommates, while all in West Georgetown live in less crowded settings.

This article appears in the Jan. 26 issue of The Georgetown Current newspaper.