Two of the District’s largest employers are trying to get expansion plans approved by the city but are meeting some stiff opposition from surrounding residents. Georgetown University and American University represent the city’s largest and sixth-largest private employers, respectively. Each are slogging though the arduous process of getting their 10-year campus plans approved by the city.
The plans include increasing the student population on campus and building more housing while adding several significant development improvements to the institutions.
But to surrounding neighbors, that potential activity means more noise and people.
“They see the traffic and the frat parties,” said Stephen Fuller, a George Mason University economist and the author of a recent report on universities’ economic effect in the region. “It is the sense that the universities take a lot [from their neighbors] and they don’t give much back.”
Universities have tended to wall themselves off from their communities, only recently making campus amenities more available to nearby residents, he said. But he added residents tend not to recognize the greater effect such institutions have on the city’s economy.
American University, which submitted its campus plan in the spring, is getting pushback over plans to relocate its law school from Massachusetts Avenue to the Tenleytown Metro station area. The plan also calls for a new dorm at what is now a parking lot at Ward Circle.
Camille Lepre, a spokeswoman for the university, said the dorms are meant to move students from off-campus to campus housing. Enrollment will be capped over the next decade, allowing for slight growth in the undergraduate population and more modest growth in the graduate population.
Georgetown, which submitted its campus plan at the end of last year, is taking the most heat from neighbors for its proposed enrollment maximum of 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Current student enrollment is roughly 13,000.
The school also is responding to residents’ requests to build a campus loop road to improve traffic flow and allow for buses to be routed off campus, but won a continuance at a city zoning hearing last week for more time to address the road’s effect. Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Ron Lewis said he thought the delay was just a ruse to get its increased enrollment approved.
“They’re taking full advantage and loading up on students and then they’ll conclude that’s the new baseline,” he said.
