Neighborhood Notes - Foxhall: 27 June 2001

The “ViewPoint” exchange between GWU and the Federation of Citizens Associations about the cap on GWU enrollment only further reinforces the need to do campus planning as a multi-year process. (I write as someone who, because of Foxhall Village location between GU and GWU’s Mt. Vernon Campus, was involved in the facilitation of two campus plans. MVC in particular succeeded through agreeing on all student numbers and a dormitory construction time-line),

The present uproar for GWU’s main campus is over the timing of freezing student enrollment until GWU has constructed sufficient undergraduate housing on-campus to bring it up to 70% (still well below that of other DC urban universities). The BZA once again did not think through the detail of its order, and the judge at one stage suggested staying the order for this academic year, but to allow it to stand for 2002-2003. The judge is heading the right way with this.

GWU’s admissions director stated she did will not know their full 2001 enrollment until October- this is no way to run a University, and GWU could take a leaf out of GU’s book who measure all student numbers in Spring and in Fall, and report it at the quarterly meeting with neighborhoods.

DC Office of Planning has begun a long-overdue overhaul of campus zoning regulations, and this lawsuit has cast a pall over that process. The city needs to kick-start this process back into life - take all the lessons learned from MVC, GU and GWU. One key step has already happened in moving responsibility from BZA to the Zoning Commission: hopefully we have seen the last of neighborhood (and University) rights being mishandled now that we have campus planning under a Commission not over-burdened with a myriad of zoning variances.