The George Washington University men’s basketball team lost its first-round NCAA tournament game, but school administrators are celebrating an important victory nevertheless.
The D.C. Zoning Commission recently approved the university’s long-term campus plan, a guide to the 180-year-old institution’s expected growth over the next two decades. Despite an ongoing fight with some neighborhood leaders in Foggy Bottom, who claim the school devours the community, the university’s expansion plans will now move forward with the blessing of the District government.
“I think we’re positioned as well as we can be on the basis of what we know now,” GWU President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg said Friday. “What the future will bring, only the future will inform us.”
The plan focuses new development on 16 campus sites by building taller and far more dense properties. It calls for the construction of 1.78 million square feet of academic, residential and commercial space. And it provides for the redevelopment of Square 54, the 2.66-acre vacant lot once home to the GWU hospital, as an 842,552-square-foot mixed-use town center.
Critics, led by the Foggy Bottom Association, continue to argue that the school’s expansion will overwhelm the historic community with more square footage than that found in the Empire State Building. The association, with the backing of the local advisory neighborhood commission, has long considered GW a developer masquerading as a school, slowly consuming the neighborhood as it expands its campus and real estate portfolio.
Foggy Bottom Association President Joy Howell said her group is looking into whether there are legal grounds to challenge the zoning commission’s ruling, which she described as a “rubber stamp.”
“We understand their desire for growth, and we respect that, but we really feel it’s time for them to look at alternative campuses,” Howell said of the university.
On I Street, the campus plan contemplates a new retail corridor. On H Street, the goal is for student residential space and modernized academic facilities. The school’s biology department, the 20-year president said, “has facilities that are pre-germ theory.”
Overall, the guide targets a more pleasant pedestrian experience with plazas, improved street crossings and landscaped streetscapes.
The zoning commission is slated to vote on Square 54 later this month. The school recently agreed to reduce the height of the proposed buildings, which will include 333 condominiums and 530,000 square feet of retail and office space, so that none exceed 115 feet.
