March 22, 2006
Possible GW Expansion Meets Neighborhood Opposition
Town-gown relations between George Washington University and their Foggy Bottom neighbors have always been somewhat contentious. Those relations may soon be getting worse.
As noted in the Washington Business Journal, the development of Square 54, the site of the university's old hospital, has been linked to a possible university expansion, one which the neighborhood does not seem to be a fan of. The university's plan to develop the site into a $250 million shopping, housing and office complex requires that the D.C. Zoning Commission increase density on the 38-acre campus by almost 2 million square feet, a move Foggy Bottom neighbors are none too happy with.
George Washington University is expressed its belief that it needs to such an expansion, as well as their desire to see Square 54 developed into something that aids the community as a whole. The residents of Foggy Bottom who comprise the Foggy Bottom Association are making it vehemently clear that they are not supporting any expansion of the sort, leaving up in the air what will happen to Square 54, which has been deemed a prime piece of District real estate.
As noted in the Washington Business Journal article:
GW has asked the city to ease the density restrictions on its campus to allow for more student housing, offices and classroom buildings. If the zoning commission denies the university's density request, GW would have to look at using its valuable Square 54 site for university-related uses.The article states that a GW growth plan calls for around 1.5 million square feet of academic and office space in addition to 500,000 square feet for student housing, space which would house around 1,000 students, to be built by 2025. Such an expansion would increase GW's building capacity from 5.6 million to 7.3 million square feet; and that wouldn't even include the development of Square 54.
On the subject of Square 54, the article quotes one expert on the matter:
It's 2.5 acres -- hello? -- on Pennsylvania Avenue and next to a Metro," says Bob Peck, a senior vice president of The Staubach Co. and former president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade. Peck is also noted as saying that the area is "lagging in vitality", and that such a diverse project would bring some much-needed activity.Last year the university commissioned the Urban Land Institute to study the development potential for the Square 54 site. The study concluded that the site was "far too valuable for anything less than a signature project."
What do District residents, especially Foggy Bottomers, think about this issue? Is this a case of NIMBY-ism at its worst, or is the university growing too far and too fast?
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The non-student residents of Foggy Bottom want to live next to a large university and pretend it doesn't exist. Meanwhile, the only grocery store is the senior safeway in the Watergate, which runs out of milk and produce if you show up after 8:30. Further, its almost impossible to find a resteraunt or cafe with outdoor seating, or a place to grab food late at night.
If development isn't allowed, Foggy Bottom will become even more of a Blackhole in the middle of a vibrant, interesting city. If you want boredom move to the suburbs.
Foggy Bottom residents are thrilled to allow the redevelopment of the Columbia Hospital into luxury condos, but they scream murder when GW tries to improve it's lot. Why? Because redevelopment of Columbia Hospital will bring in more members to the Foggy Bottom Association.
Meanwhile, GW want's to use the money from this project and a higher density on campus to build a cancer center.
So...residents want more members for the FBA. GW wants to cure cancer.
It was quite apparent to me, as a freshman in 1997, that the FBA, and the Foggy Bottom ANC, wanted the University to wither away. Any attempt by GW to remodel, repurpose, replace or expand any of its buildings was met with fierce resistance. Non-university residents have repeatedly stated their preference for empty parking lots and rubble-strewn land over hospitals, classroom space, housing and mixed-use retail and office buildings.
The residents see the students, the University and the Hospital as a nuisance that prevents Foggy Bottom from being a quaint, historic corner of the District. They forget that the land on which they live was dredged from the river and would be little more than a collection of run-down row houses and government office space if it weren't for GW.
I'm guessing that the people that live in Foggy Bottom now have not lived there since the 1960s. When the area was skid row. When it was unsafe to cross Washington Circle at night (for fear of being mugged or raped) and the area was a magnet for drug dealers and prostitutes. Like so many NIMBYS, they fail to understand the changes in their own neighborhoods as they are often the new additions (the gentrifiers) and have taken an attitude that the area should freeze in time to the exact moment that they bought in.
What is a NIMBY?
It stands for Not In My BackYard
http://www.wordspy.com/words/NIMBY.asp
I am about to move to Foggy Bottom and I would love to see them develop a signature Shopping mall with upscale grocery, apparrel and other retail shops. It would be wonderful for the area and also benefit the university. As a newly minted resident of the neighborhood I will rally around this development! Please Join Me
I suspect that relations between Foggy Bottom residents and GWU could improve immensely, should a couple of things come to pass:
1) GW does a better job of policing its own students. This may actually be happening. Three years of dealing with the undergrads (and not a few law students) while was there was enough to give me a bit of sympathy for local long term residents.
2) A few of the residents who actually HAVE lived there since George Washington was president (and not a university) flee for Ft. Lauderdale. On the whole, GW has been a pretty bad neighbor, I think. And for those who've been around a long time, the water has been irreversibly poisoned. These are the same folks who have the most time to make trouble for the university now.
3) Stephen Joel Trachtenburg gets drop kicked to Wyoming.
Actually, maybe just #3 would help the most. The man could make Mother Teresa want to slap him.
More than any other person, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg (always helpful to know the spelling; you can learn spelling in college) is responsible for turning GW into a world-class research university. When he arrived in 1987, the school was moribund and sinking into obscurity. The opposing fortunes of AU and GW since tell the tale of how important SJT has been in dramatically increasing every measurement of the university's success.
You may not like him personally, but like people who actually make things happen with their lives, I doubt he really gives a rat's ass . . .
The non-student residents of Foggy Bottom want to live next to a large university and pretend it doesn't exist.
Now I hear this a lot from GWU students and supporters, but it's always seemed equally true that the university wants to live in a residential neighborhood and pretend that IT doesn't exist.
There are problems here on both sides. Rampant NIMBYism from the non-University population clashes with GW's apparent belief that Foggy Bottom exists only as a space for the university to develop. (And judging from my experience, many undergrads think the lawns in Foggy Bottom exist only as places for them to stop and puke on the way home from the bars.)
The whole community needs to knock it off and accept the fact that each other exist.
For those above posters who are not employees of GW's PR division or of the developer--Boston Properties--with which GW contracted with some long time ago to create the Mall of America over the Foggy Bottom Metro stop, I commend the following article written in the 2-27-06 issue of the GW Hatchet student paper by a GW prof.
Where has your tuition gone?
Donald O. Parsons
Posted: 2/27/06
After struggling with courses either closed or crammed into improbably small spaces and taught by adjunct faculty, who are often excellent, but less often available for discussion and/or recommendations "next" semester, a student can reasonably ask, "Where has my ample tuition payment gone?"
As at any university, some of your money goes to purposes, administrative and academic, of questionable value, especially when basic educational resources are strained. What distinguishes GW from other schools is the share of your tuition money that goes to benefit not you, but future GW students. The form of your gift is your acceptance of these classroom deficiencies.
Your perhaps unrecognized role as benefactors of the University is not an accident. As seniors are well aware, the University expanded rapidly in the past few years. Full-time equivalent undergraduate enrollments rose by 50 percent between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2003, full-time graduate enrollments by 17 percent. Expansion of this magnitude is expensive. Universities typically pace expansion to the administration's ability to "sell" alumni and other friends of the University on the excitement of the expansion. Unfortunately, the current GW administration's ambitions are large and its abilities to raise funds small, so GW proceeded in its Great Expansion without external support.
Instead, the University turned to you to finance the expansion. The dramatic increase in the number of students and the very large increases in tuition have led to a revenue bonanza for the University. Alas, the University has not expanded the educational resources to match these numbers. Throughout the Great Expansion, the number of regular tenure-track faculty, generally held to be the permanent core of the University, has been effectively frozen. By not expanding the resources devoted to educate you, the large tuition revenue gains have been converted directly into profits for the University. Make no mistake about it - GW is currently a very profitable nonprofit.
Of course this "surplus" cannot be distributed as dividends to the administration and trustees. Instead it has been used to finance the University's future physical plant. The 2007 budget, for example, includes a $47 million transfer from operating revenues - largely your tuition and dorm payments - to the capital account and another $13 million from operating revenue directly to construction. To put these sums in perspective, total projected operating revenues are slightly less than $500 million.
The Faculty Senate has become concerned about the decline in educational resources per student. At a Special Meeting of the Faculty Senate on Feb. 3, the administration, represented by Executive Vice President and Treasurer Louis Katz, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Donald Lehman, and Senior Vice President for Student and Academic Support Services Robert Chernak, provided clear and candid accounts of the state of the University. (See www.gwu.edu/%7Efacsen/faculty_senate/minutes.html).
Their reports broadly confirm the strategy laid out above. Executive Vice President Lehman presented disturbing evidence of the erosion of educational resources at GW in the last five to seven years. He also gave a picture of where this chronic neglect of educational quality places us. In the fall of 2004, for example, part-time faculty, graduate teaching associates and visitors together taught approximately one half (49 percent) of all GW sections and almost the same share of students (45.5 percent). Another 12.9 percent of sections and 11.8 percent of students were taught by contract faculty with a longer, but still limited connection to the University. Regular tenure track faculty, once viewed as the core of the University teaching staff, taught only 38 percent of all sections and 42.6 percent of students.
A refreshing aspect of Executive Vice President Katz's financial presentation was his open acceptance of alternate strategies, with the sensible warning that additional 2007 expenditures on teaching resources for current students must come largely from either unanticipated gifts from alumni and other donors, or less ambitious capital plans. Given the president's well-known difficulties as a fundraiser, it seems reasonable to assume that improvements in the educational experiences of current students must come from the slower repayment of debt and/or the placement of new debt. This has consequences. A reallocation of resources to bolster the educational environment of current students may lead to slower expansion of the physical plant, including the future science center and much-needed general classroom and office space.
The Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Faculty, of which I am chair, has long argued that this diversion of resources from current to future students is excessive. The department chairs of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences recently petitioned the University's chief academic officer, Executive Vice President Lehman, to lead efforts to rebalance budget priorities between current education and the early completion of building projects in favor of current education.
If you share the view that the administration needs to concentrate more seriously on providing a high quality education to current students, now is the time for you to speak up, individually and collectively.
-The writer is a professor and chair of the Economics Department.
© Copyright 2006 GW Hatchet
For those above posters who are not employees of GW's PR division or of the developer--Boston Properties--with which GW contracted with some long time ago to create the Mall of America over the Foggy Bottom Metro stop, I commend the following article written in the 2-27-06 issue of the GW Hatchet student paper by a GW prof.
Where has your tuition gone?
Donald O. Parsons
Posted: 2/27/06
After struggling with courses either closed or crammed into improbably small spaces and taught by adjunct faculty, who are often excellent, but less often available for discussion and/or recommendations "next" semester, a student can reasonably ask, "Where has my ample tuition payment gone?"
As at any university, some of your money goes to purposes, administrative and academic, of questionable value, especially when basic educational resources are strained. What distinguishes GW from other schools is the share of your tuition money that goes to benefit not you, but future GW students. The form of your gift is your acceptance of these classroom deficiencies.
Your perhaps unrecognized role as benefactors of the University is not an accident. As seniors are well aware, the University expanded rapidly in the past few years. Full-time equivalent undergraduate enrollments rose by 50 percent between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2003, full-time graduate enrollments by 17 percent. Expansion of this magnitude is expensive. Universities typically pace expansion to the administration's ability to "sell" alumni and other friends of the University on the excitement of the expansion. Unfortunately, the current GW administration's ambitions are large and its abilities to raise funds small, so GW proceeded in its Great Expansion without external support.
Instead, the University turned to you to finance the expansion. The dramatic increase in the number of students and the very large increases in tuition have led to a revenue bonanza for the University. Alas, the University has not expanded the educational resources to match these numbers. Throughout the Great Expansion, the number of regular tenure-track faculty, generally held to be the permanent core of the University, has been effectively frozen. By not expanding the resources devoted to educate you, the large tuition revenue gains have been converted directly into profits for the University. Make no mistake about it - GW is currently a very profitable nonprofit.
Of course this "surplus" cannot be distributed as dividends to the administration and trustees. Instead it has been used to finance the University's future physical plant. The 2007 budget, for example, includes a $47 million transfer from operating revenues - largely your tuition and dorm payments - to the capital account and another $13 million from operating revenue directly to construction. To put these sums in perspective, total projected operating revenues are slightly less than $500 million.
The Faculty Senate has become concerned about the decline in educational resources per student. At a Special Meeting of the Faculty Senate on Feb. 3, the administration, represented by Executive Vice President and Treasurer Louis Katz, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Donald Lehman, and Senior Vice President for Student and Academic Support Services Robert Chernak, provided clear and candid accounts of the state of the University. (See www.gwu.edu/%7Efacsen/faculty_senate/minutes.html).
Their reports broadly confirm the strategy laid out above. Executive Vice President Lehman presented disturbing evidence of the erosion of educational resources at GW in the last five to seven years. He also gave a picture of where this chronic neglect of educational quality places us. In the fall of 2004, for example, part-time faculty, graduate teaching associates and visitors together taught approximately one half (49 percent) of all GW sections and almost the same share of students (45.5 percent). Another 12.9 percent of sections and 11.8 percent of students were taught by contract faculty with a longer, but still limited connection to the University. Regular tenure track faculty, once viewed as the core of the University teaching staff, taught only 38 percent of all sections and 42.6 percent of students.
A refreshing aspect of Executive Vice President Katz's financial presentation was his open acceptance of alternate strategies, with the sensible warning that additional 2007 expenditures on teaching resources for current students must come largely from either unanticipated gifts from alumni and other donors, or less ambitious capital plans. Given the president's well-known difficulties as a fundraiser, it seems reasonable to assume that improvements in the educational experiences of current students must come from the slower repayment of debt and/or the placement of new debt. This has consequences. A reallocation of resources to bolster the educational environment of current students may lead to slower expansion of the physical plant, including the future science center and much-needed general classroom and office space.
The Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Faculty, of which I am chair, has long argued that this diversion of resources from current to future students is excessive. The department chairs of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences recently petitioned the University's chief academic officer, Executive Vice President Lehman, to lead efforts to rebalance budget priorities between current education and the early completion of building projects in favor of current education.
If you share the view that the administration needs to concentrate more seriously on providing a high quality education to current students, now is the time for you to speak up, individually and collectively.
-The writer is a professor and chair of the Economics Department.
© Copyright 2006 GW Hatchet
"For those above posters who are not employees of GW's PR division or of the developer--Boston Properties"
classic, paranoid Foggy Bottom residents. if we disagree, then we must work for the University! what narrow-minded bollocks.
"...classic, paranoid Foggy Bottom residents. if we disagree, then we must work for the University! what narrow-minded bollocks."
-posted by jul
You didn't read my post, now did you, Mr. jul? You just decided to engage in childish name calling and badmouthing to distract readers from the real issue: George Washington University's latest nutty, grandiose, money-making scheme.
Instead of using Square 54 to build a cancer center, science center and student housing that you claim GWU wants--and for which its faculty and students have been begging and which the residents would fully support--GWU is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to bully the City and residents into allowing it to create a giant commercial project--an office building, two apartment buildings and a giant shopping mall--that have nothing to do with GW's educational mission--on top of the Foggy Bottom Metro.
And, once GW sets up this self-serving money machine for itself, it wants to dump its academic and housing needs onto what little is left of neighborhood.
But, let me guess, if GW succeeds, you'll get your consulting/facilitating fee and more work from the City and/or GW.