The Hatchet’s editorial board discusses the potential of Hall on Virginia Avenue to solve some of GW’s current space problems.
The University’s capital budget this year includes funding for the launch of a feasibility study into combining Crawford, Schenley and West End residence halls into a single dorm. The study falls under the 20-year campus plan, an encompassing outline of the goals that GW has for expansion and development. But while approaching the current campus plan, GW needs to consider the unfulfilled potential of Hall on Virginia Avenue, or HOVA, as a solution to some of its current space issues.
You ask a question of yourself in your piece, what to do about the graduate housing already in HOVA? and then don’t answer it. We know you want to put grad students somewhere with more kitchens…but where?
You tell graduate students to live elsewhere. There is no requirement that they live on campus, and HoVA wasn’t grad housing until a couple years ago. I think that this is a particularly good idea and something that should be looked into.
Grad students can move into DC. They’re not freshmen, it’s perfectly acceptable for them to find housing in Foggy Bottom or elsewhere.
The idea is completely absurd. There are 12,000 graduate students and only 200 available beds for those graduate students (excluding the Aston which is only for 1st year law students). Plus, there is a waiting list for HOVA so clearly people want to live there.
“People” (graduate students) may want to live on campus with fellow students but believe me no one who has the experience of living in HOVA “wants to live there”. The kitchens kitchens are filthy and smell. The carpets in the rooms are not shampooed because the will “fall apart” so you move in to carpet that is more dirty than the sidewalk outside. There are rats in the rooms. You can smell decaying rats. I just can’t imagine someone wanting to live here. False advertising about the bulding for sure.