Turf Wars

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Like other ambitious institutions, George Washington has been on a busy building spree lately. It opened three new residence halls in 1999 and 2000, broke ground on another in 2002, and completed one more this year -- all on land the university has purchased in recent years. But as the university has grown, so have its legal fees. Since 2001, George Washington has been a party to no less than four separate court battles based on what critics call the university's "explosive" growth.

Over time, the university has steadily encroached on Foggy Bottom, the District of Columbia neighborhood surrounding its campus. Now residents there say they have no option but to sue to preserve what is left of their shrinking community. "We're getting shafted," says Ron Cocome, the president of the Foggy Bottom Association, a residents' group that has supported attempts to contain the university. "They're gutting our neighborhood."

University administrators insist they are in a bind: Constricting George Washington's growth, they say, will hamper their continuing efforts to develop a campus that will attract top students. And so they wind up in court, over and over again.

Some universities have found less litigious ways of dealing with wary neighbors. Officials at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, say that community-outreach programs and continuous communication with local residents help quell disagreements, including property disputes, before they mushroom into lawsuits.

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, George Washington's president, says that the university does try to cooperate with its neighbors, but that some of them rebuff its overtures. Lawsuits are sometimes the most effective way of resolving property disputes, says Mr. Trachtenberg, who is credited with -- and, quite often, criticized for -- engineering the university's expansion during his 15-year tenure. "That's what courts are for," he says. "They give us a forum in which contrasting points of view are argued and resolved. ... It's the American way."

"We wouldn't spend a penny on litigation if we didn't have to," says John F. Williams, George Washington's provost. Taking cases to court not only sours community relations but also puts an unwelcome squeeze on the university's budget. Says Mr. Williams: "Sometimes you don't have a choice. ... You have to do what's in the best interests of the university."

Courting a Challenge

The number of property-related legal battles George Washington has been involved in makes it something of a standout, but it isn't the only university that has ended up in court over real-estate disputes. Northwestern University is currently suing Evanston, Ill., over a city-council decision to include several university properties in a historic district where development is restricted. In recent years, New York University has fended off a pair of lawsuits lodged by residents of Greenwich Village who were concerned that two new NYU buildings threatened the character of the storied neighborhood.

In a dense urban setting, it is nearly impossible to expand a university without touching off protest from at least some local residents, says Michael Haberman, NYU's director of government and community relations. He says that NYU's efforts to appease its neighbors sometimes fail -- and lead to lawsuits -- because "there are just some people who don't like change."

Universities often prevail in town-gown legal challenges, according to David J. Maurrasse, an expert in campus planning and an assistant professor of public affairs at Columbia University. The legal and financial resources they have at their disposal, he explains, far outweigh those of community groups and even local municipalities. But he warns that relying solely on court rulings to help a university grow degrades community relations and may fuel more town-gown squabbles down the road.

In planning campus expansions, "there has to be a focus on mutual benefit," says Mr. Maurrasse. Administrators, he says, should consider "how to meet the needs of the community while simultaneously developing the university."

A Student Ghetto?

In Foggy Bottom, some local residents say the university is intent on pushing out long-time residents to develop more student housing. They fear that Foggy Bottom stands on the brink of becoming a student ghetto. Hence the lawsuits.

In one lawsuit, tenants of the York apartment complex alleged that George Washington had illegally used land across the street from York to build a new home for its international-affairs school. Tenants argued that the building now housing the university's Elliott School of International Affairs sat on land zoned specifically for the construction of condominiums.

In another suit, a homeowner charged that the university used underhanded tactics to purchase and then tear down most of the townhouses on his block, only to build a massive dormitory that rests partly on his own roof.

In a third, residents of the famous Watergate complex argued that the university failed to obtain the necessary exception to city zoning rules before it converted a nearby hotel, which was used as a lookout point for the Watergate burglars, into a dormitory. George Washington won that suit, but the other two are still pending.

The largest and most enduring of George Washington's real estate legal woes is a suit it filed to try to overturn a 2001 order by a city zoning board. University lawyers have argued the case in three different D.C. area courts -- a U.S. District Court, the D.C. Court of Appeals, and a U.S. Court of Appeals.

The order required that 70 percent of the university's undergraduates must live within its campus boundaries. (Currently, 38 percent are housed in off-campus facilities.) The zoning board later tagged on a condition designed to enforce its order: No new academic complexes could be built, the board said, until the university met the residential requirement.

This past September, after a string of different rulings from the three courts, the D.C. Court of Appeals ordered a solution that might finally put the matter to rest: George Washington must meet the 70-percent benchmark by 2006. Until then, the university is free to build as it wishes.

For George Washington officials, the ruling came as good, but not ideal, news. University lawyers say they will continue to try to get the original zoning order overturned so that the university's existing off-campus dorms won't go to waste.

Officials at the city's office of planning, who are often caught in the middle of disputes between George Washington and its neighbors, say that the 2006 deadline benefits both the city and Foggy Bottom residents. They say it reinforces local laws that keep the university's growth in check. "It was a positive decision," says Ellen McCarthy, a deputy director at the office of planning, "because the major thrust of it was to say to G.W., 'You have to comply with campus-plan regulations.'"

But some Foggy Bottom residents are less optimistic. "It's rendered the campus-planning process a mockery," says Elizabeth B. Elliott, a member of the Foggy Bottom Association.

The September ruling, Ms. Elliott says, gives George Washington free rein to build academic complexes, such as the planned new home for the university's business school, on land that should be reserved for on-campus dormitories.

Ms. Elliott also heads the tenant group suing over the construction of the Elliott School. Bringing the suit, she says, is an onerous task, but also a worthy one because Foggy Bottom is fast becoming a "de facto campus."

"G.W. is supposed to be a guest in this neighborhood," she says, "but they've turned into the controllers of Foggy Bottom."

A Presidential Endeavor

Mr. Trachtenberg looms larger than any other figure in the Foggy Bottom-George Washington saga.

Colleagues praise him as a visionary who has taken strides to improve most facets of the university since his arrival in 1988.

He has improved the aesthetic appeal of the university, installing a brick-paved quad and tall iron gates emblazoned with George Washington's initials. He has overseen the development of a number of modern facilities, such as a sprawling new fitness center and a high-tech School of Media and Public Affairs. And the changes he has made have helped lure more students to the university. The number of applicants to George Washington has nearly tripled since 1988. In the past five years alone, the undergraduate student body has shot up by more than 2,000, to 9,223. About 250 of those students live on a satellite campus.

But some Foggy Bottom residents say that despite his achievements, Mr. Trachtenberg's dealings with the Foggy Bottom neighborhood reveal a less admirable side of his personality. His Foggy Bottom critics describe him as, at best, arrogant and dismissive, and at worst, rude and deceitful.

"He couldn't care less about the community," says Ms. Elliott, "and he tries to manipulate every law and agreement to his advantage."

Donald W. Kreuzer -- the property owner who has sued George Washington over a dormitory that, he says, unlawfully extends over his roof -- is more guarded in describing Mr. Trachtenberg: "I think he's misplaced as the leader of a university. He's really a property developer."

Dr. Kreuzer, a dentist who both lives and works in Foggy Bottom, can attest to the intensely active, hands-on role the university president plays in George Washington's expansion because, he says, he has witnessed it firsthand.

In 1999, long before he filed claims against George Washington, he was the only homeowner holding out on a block of townhouses that had been systematically acquired by the university. It was then that Mr. Trachtenberg began to correspond with Dr. Kreuzer in a series of letters in which the university president tried to persuade the dentist to sell his three adjoining townhouses to the university.

Mr. Trachtenberg's letters were cordial yet strongly worded. "Let me ask you to work with my people in a reflective way so that we can draw on the best of us," he wrote in the first of five letters sent to Dr. Kreuzer. "Simply being angry with each other will get us nowhere."

Coffee and Pound Cake

With two of his letters, Mr. Trachtenberg included clipped advertisements of other D.C. neighborhoods in which Dr. Kreuzer could make his home, should he decide to sell his houses and leave Foggy Bottom. He also invited Dr. Kreuzer to join him to discuss the situation over "a cup of coffee and a piece of pound cake." The two men eventually did meet, but their talks yielded little in the way of compromise: Dr. Kreuzer, a 20-year resident of Foggy Bottom, wanted to stay put.

Now Dr. Kreuzer says he is spending close to a million dollars to mitigate the consequences of his decision to remain in Foggy Bottom. He suspects that spite motivated the university to cantilever a section of its new dormitory over his house. He likens Mr. Trachtenberg to "a schoolyard bully." The university argues that it is building the cantilevered section out to the actual property line, which it says runs inside one of Dr. Kreuzer's townhouses.

Mr. Trachtenberg says he has never bullied anyone and maintains that George Washington conducts all of its business openly and lawfully. The university isn't perfect, he concedes, but "we couldn't possibly be as thoughtless as some of our mean-spirited critics accuse us of being," he says. "We have the virtues and vices of a large organization trying to live as constructively as we can in an urban community."

Troubled History

Unlike George Washington, officials at the University of Pennsylvania say they have never gone to court to defend the university's growth. Still, they say that tensions between the university and the local community were once high enough to rival those in any town-gown dispute.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when tough economic times nationwide devastated much of west Philadelphia, the university bought and demolished block after block of run-down housing in order to create a buffer zone between the campus and declining, increasingly crime-ridden local neighborhoods.

Penn should have used its resources then to help stabilize its surrounding community, says Omar Blaik, senior vice president for facilities and real-estate services at the university. "We could have been a calming agent," he says, "but, in fact, what happened was we participated in a national trend of declining cities."

For the past decade, the university has worked to redeem itself, Mr. Blaik says. It has built several new on-campus dormitories, he says, and has worked with local realtors to ensure that neighborhood houses overrun with students are transformed into single-family homes whose prospective residents -- young professionals with children -- would bring stability to the community. As a result of this and other community-outreach efforts, Mr. Blaik says, relations between Penn and local residents have improved tremendously.

At George Washington, administrators say that they too have worked hard at helping their neighborhood blossom. Naysayers, they insist, are welcome to browse "Community Commitments," a glossy catalog filled with pictures of George Washington students and professors volunteering at D.C. public schools and in local charity events.

Administrators also point to various community-service awards, including a proclamation signed last September by Anthony A. Williams, Washington's mayor, congratulating the university for joining with local residents to "create one of the most vibrant, successful and unique neighborhoods in our nation's capital."

It is a vocal minority of Foggy Bottom residents who have stymied cooperation between the university and the community, George Washington officials say, noting that a city-created commission made up of Foggy Bottom neighborhood leaders and university administrators has yet to come together because groups such as the Foggy Bottom Association refuse to send their representatives to meet with George Washington officials.

But leaders of the association, including its president, Mr. Cocome, say that it wouldn't make sense to meet with the university while it continues to challenge city planning regulations. Even if the commission eventually meets, Mr. Cocome says, he is not counting on it to usher in a new era of cooperation between George Washington and its neighbors. The wounds, he says, run far too deep. "University leadership has destroyed any trust between the university and the community," Mr. Cocome says. "It's very sad."

	Buildings built or acquired mostly during the presidency of Stephen Joel Trachtenberg		Building under construction
	Buildings that existed in 1986, before Mr. Trachtenberg became president		Building being demolished
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting; Chronicle graphic by Dave Allen