AU students need more, quality on-campus housing

American University recently presented neighbors with the latest draft of its 10-year campus plan.

The top priorities are to increase undergraduate student housing and provide more space for student recreation, dining, and activities on campus.

The most controversial of the plan’s elements is the construction of an East Campus, across Nebraska Avenue from the current main campus.

AU would like to increase its on-campus bed count capacity to 4,100 students, down from the 4,900 proposed in the previous draft. AU’s dorms are currently designed to house 3,533 students, but through tripling students and agreements with the nearby Berkshire apartments, the university is able to hold over 4,000.

On-campus housing is better than off-campus housing for many reasons. It puts students closer to everything that happens on campus, from speakers to classes, and almost always means a better relationship between students and landlords.

But on-campus housing can’t be built with paper-thin walls and stack students up like sardines. Meeting the housing needs of students means building exactly the kind of living that the east campus offers.

New dorms

The plan details a new dorm on South Side to hold about 200 students, an addition to Nebraska to hold around 125, and a series of dorms on East Campus meant for just under 800 residents. The increase in housing is meant to guarantee housing for both freshman and sophomores (currently, AU can only guarantee 85% of sophomores housing) and to reduce the number of triples, or the practice of cramming three freshmen in rooms meant for two residents.

Currently a large parking lot, Nebraska Lot lies east of AU, separated from the campus proper by Nebraska Avenue, a fairly busy road. The plan calls for that space to be replaced by six buildings, four of which would be dorms (the other being used for the alumni center, the new campus center, and office space). Underneath the new campus would be an underground parking garage.

To ensure that students could only cross Nebraska at the signaled crosswalk, the entire campus would be fenced, with the only entrance/exit by foot being a gap in that fence near New Mexico Avenue (at its intersection with Nebraska). Two roads also enter the campus, but both lead to the underground garage.

Residents are concerned that this campus will be relatively close to their homes. The back of the furthest buildings rest 40 to 80 feet or more from the backs of the adjoined houses at Westover Place, and residents there are worried about how these new buildings will affect their lives.

With no real buffer between the homes and the lot currently, the height of the buildings (54 feet for the dorms and slightly lower for the others) have the potential to dominate their sights out of their back windows.

Residents also complain that noise from the dorms will disturb them. Many at recent ANC meetings have complained of potential and raucous partying (an unneeded anxiety, given campus policies) and the potential for vandalism, which is also unlikely.

Pedestrians at Nebraska Avenue

Neighbors also complained that the increase in number of pedestrians crossing Nebraska would both disrupt the flow of traffic on that road and be dangerous for both students and drivers. Both claims require study, but cannot be determined at this time with the certitude residents put forward).

Regardless, the issue of East Campus remains the flash point of this campus plan, and the University doesn’t seem to be willing to budge. While this draft (the third of this campus plan) showed a reduction of 800 housed students from the previous one, the number of students being housed on East Campus has been held more-or-less constant throughout the whole process.

The University insists that an East Campus remains the best place to house that volume of additional students, and that it will not negatively affect traffic flow. However, it could have done a far better job of explaining these claims at meetings with local stakeholders.

Retail and urban design

Retail would be part of the proposed east campus. Having more that students can reach by walking is good for the students, the environment, and the city’s revenues.

Students should hope, though, that the University avoids the mistakes from past construction on the campus. It’s hard for a business to survive on students and employees alone. Witness the failure of the McDonald’s hidden away in a tunnel in the middle of campus, and the pizzeria before it.

Bringing the buildings with retail closer to the street could expand the buffer offered to our neighbors in Westover, help the businesses attract outside customers, and provide a visual cue to passing drivers to slow down.

The plan also shows the Washington College of Law moving to the Tenley campus, and calls for the construction of an Alumni Center, a new Campus Visiting Center, and several other new buildings.

Another facet of the plan is growing the number of enrolled students from 10,297 to 13,600. However, grad and law students dominate this increase in population; the number of undergraduates will be modestly raised from 6,300 to 6,400.

Several other issues have been raised by the community as well. Some say that the increased traffic from graduate students and new university employees will make the horrid traffic problems around Ward Circle even worse. Others raise the concern that dangerous chemicals from Army Corps of Engineers operations during World War I still remain around the Nebraska lot, and could prove hazardous to students living in dorms there. However, it’s unclear what evidence there is to support this claim.

Parking

Finally, residents complain that the reduction in surface parking on campus will adversely affect the current problem of students parking in neighborhoods and walking to campus. Students do this often to avoid the high costs of parking on campus, which in themselves are meant to encourage students to carpool or walk.

The American University campus plan has attracted a lot of attention — most of it angry and resentful. At the special meeting ANC 3D recently held on the campus plan, most of the normal complaints about students and universities were trotted out: students are all raging drunkards, the school is a neighborhood bully, further development will destroy property values, and did you hear about that time that one kid did that one ridiculous thing?

We agree more with some of the things we’ve heard our neighbors say than others. What we didn’t hear was a lot about what the new plan means for students and what they need.

Student needs matter

What American University students want from our plan is simple: building for our needs. We aren’t the only stakeholders in the process: professors and departments need be wooed and supported, and neighbors have legitimate concerns.

But at the end of the day, we are the university’s customers, products, and inhabitants. We come to the school at what are often some of the most vulnerable, confusing, and thrilling times of our lives, and we rely on the campus, the community, and the neighborhood to help us make something of ourselves.

The campus plan is a part of that, and it’s important that we make our voices heard in its crafting and implementation. Even if each of us is only here for a few years, together there are thousands of us here for decades. We want both the next few years and those future decades to be good ones.

Cross-posted from two posts at DC Students Speak.