The number of students legally allowed to live off campus may decrease because of a recent proposal by the D.C. Office of Planning designed to limit the number of students residing in neighborhoods surrounding D.C. universities. The proposal must be approved by the Board of Zoning Adjustment but faces considerable opposition from students and administrators.

A proposed “minor” amendment to the D.C. Human Rights Act of 1977 would exclude students from a list of demographic groups against whom it is illegal to discriminate in the district. If the amendment passes, D.C. could legally cap the number of Georgetown students living in local off-campus housing at 700 people and coerce all other students wishing to live in the area into either on-campus housing or accommodations in other areas of the city, Virginia or Maryland.

“I am appalled,” Jeanne Lord, assistant dean of students, said. “If you start discriminating with students, you don’t know where you’ll end up. This country has had painful years in its past, and it’s worked hard to provide a life of quality. We can’t make exceptions to [human rights] laws. Everyone has rights or no one has rights. We can’t carve out special groups.”

Currently, 2,113 main campus Georgetown University students live off-campus.

If the amendment were made today, 1,413 students could be legally required to move out of the immediate Georgetown area, encompassed by zip code 20007.

The suggested cap on the number of Georgetown students living off-campus was set at 700 by the D.C. Office of Planning in their report on the Georgetown campus plan.

“It’s discrimination,” said Justin Wagner (COL ’03), an unopposed candidate for the Advisory Neighborhood Council 2E05 seat. “After the 700th student is housed, then it’s off to Foggy Bottom or Rosslyn for the 701st student,” he said. Wagner also hinted that the plan would be difficult to enforce.

“What is the university going to do, walk up to every door and make sure a student isn’t living there? It’s just not practicable,” he said.

The ANC 2E05 district includes Alumni Square, Village C, the Jesuit Residence and the area defined by N, O and P Streets running to Wisconsin Avenue.

In its Sept. 8 report, the Office of Planning proposed amending the D.C. Human Rights Law to legalize its suggested methods of limiting the number of students living in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood surrounding George Washington. If accepted by the BZA, its opponents say this restriction would violate the D.C. Human Rights law’s intent.

Currently, the law’s stated purpose is to end “discrimination by reason of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, familial status, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, disability, source of income and place of residence or business.”

The proposal to amend the law was made in the D.C. Office of Planning’s recommendations on the George Washington University’s campus plan. Georgetown, George Washington and other D.C. area schools traditionally submit 10-year campus plans for approval each decade to gain the District’s authorization for campus changes to occur in upcoming years.

If the recommendation to the George Washington plan is accepted and an amendment is ratified, the school will be required to “encourage students to seek housing in parts of the city or region other than Foggy Bottom/West End,” according to the Office of Planning’s recommendations.

If the law is amended, Georgetown students exceeding the cap would similarly be encouraged to leave the area and seek housing in Rosslyn or other areas of the city.

“We didn’t recommend a cap,” said David King, legal counsel to the director of planning. “We asked [George Washington] to establish a housing program encouraging students to live far away, or to set up an incentive program. The university felt that if they did that, they would be violating the D.C. Human Rights Act,” he said.

“It’s not our read of the law, but it is their interpretation,” he said.

“We were concerned the actions we’d have to take would violate the Human Rights law,” Charles Barber, senior counsel for George Washington said.

King said that amending the law would allow George Washington to provide incentives to students if they do not reside in the Foggy Bottom or West End neighborhoods, since the law currently states that preferences, incentives and discrimination of certain classes are all illegal.

“One could argue that the cards they give students with discounts for things, that could be illegal,” King said. “It gives a preference to students. That’s nuts.”

King said the legislation was currently flawed, and legalizing preferences would improve the oversight.

The decision to amend the Human Rights law now rests before the Board of Zoning Adjustment, the D.C. office charged with final approval of university campus plans. The BZA will decide on Nov. 15 if it will accept George Washington’s plan and if they will accept, modify or reject the Office of Planning’s recommendation to implement preferences and incentives for students living in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood and press for an amendment to legalize that action. Any amendment considered would have to be ratified by a vote of the D.C. city council.

The Georgetown campus plan was submitted to the BZA in June 2000, complete with its own set of recommendations from the Office of Planning. The BZA’s decision on the Georgetown plan will be made on Nov. 8.

“We start from the premise that the city wants great neighborhoods and great universities. The problem comes in where the expansion of the university impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods,” said John Fondersmith, who worked for the district as part of a team on the Georgetown campus plan in the Office of Planning. “Georgetown is a special case, because when the Southwest Quadrangle comes on line in 2003, the situation of students living in the surrounding area will improve, since students will be moving into the Southwest Quadrangle out of the neighborhood.”

Once the Southwest Quadrangle is completed in 2003, the new beds will be filled by students who would otherwise contribute to the off-campus population. However, the university plans to increase enrollment gradually after the completion of construction in order to raise revenue.

The Southwest Quadrangle project will add 780 new beds in the constructed residence hall. The university is asking the BZA to approve an increase of 389 additional undergraduate students to the current enrollment cap.

“The tricky part comes in then with an increase in enrollment after 2003,” Fondersmith said. “We suggested that when the number of students gets over 700, obviously the university will have to do certain things. It wouldn’t be that the university would decrease the number of off-campus students, but it would indicate that there is a problem coming up,” he said.

“The university should not be creating a condition causing that many students to live in the surrounding area. They should not be increasing enrollment without taking steps beyond that. If it goes up to 700, they need to take additional steps,” Fondersmith added.

“It’s ridiculous to expect the university to house 100 percent of its students,” Wagner said. “There are only five schools in the country that do that, and they’re all military schools. If you look at other comparable schools [to Georgetown] like the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, we house more students on-campus than they do. Georgetown is more than fair, and I applaud them for all they’ve done,” Wagner added.

According to U.S. News and World Report, 33 percent of Georgetown’s undergraduate population is housed off-campus. Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania house 22 and 38 percent off campus, respectively.

An unrelated yet similar attempt to limit students in off-campus housing was made in the mid-90s, then called a “zoning overlay.”

The zoning overlay plan was approved by the Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Council and tried to limit students living in Burleith and Georgetown by restricting housing codes to limit the number of individuals per square foot. Later proposed legislation also sought to limit the number of unrelated individuals living in one house. The proposal was ultimately dropped in November 1997.

The 1997 proposal addressed students directly in its legislation despite the broadly applicable nature of its housing law changes and was widely perceived to be discriminatory in nature.

“One thing that happened during the zoning overlay plan was that [former] Mayor Marion Barry came to Georgetown to talk about the issue,” said Brian McCabe (SFS ’02), co-chair of Campaign Georgetown. “About 300 kids showed up to the meeting and said, `We’re registered to vote, and we don’t like this.’ So many students were active and registered to vote in 1997 – we had over 1,000 students registered to vote in D.C. – and D.C.’s not that big. One thousand votes makes a huge voting block.”

McCabe and Wagner both strongly advocated students registering to vote in the District, contacting local representatives and getting involved. Currently, about 550 Georgetown students are already on the D.C. voter rolls, and about 500 registered this semester, according to McCabe.

“This proposal came out a week or two ago, and we’re lucky we were able to catch it early and nip it in the bud. They are trying to do it quietly, without anyone noticing,” Wagner said. “To defeat this, students need to start organizing, writing letters and talking to representatives.”

“This issue will surface again,” McCabe said. “Students will get surprised, outraged. We voted last time and we will vote again. Elected officials need to realize that we are a special interest group and take that into account.”

“I hope we will be able to review the proposal very soon, given its importance,” said Charles Holman, director of D.C. Office of Human Rights. The office is still studying the proposal and was not prepared to comment.

“Amending the Human Rights Law is a very, very serious undertaking,” said John Ralls, a representative from City Councilman Jack Evans’ office. “It’s a law that is very important to the gay and lesbian community, Asian-Americans, Latinos and several other groups that are protected under it. It’s water you have to tread very carefully when dealing with the law.” Evans’ Ward 2 district includes both George Washington and Georgetown Universities.

Georgetown University has “not formulated a position on this issue and will continue to review the matter,” according to Julie Bataille, assistant vice-president for communications.

“The official GW position is that there should not be an amendment,” Barber said. “We feel students should have the right to live off-campus.”

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