Rethink College Park

The Diamondback printed today RTCP’s own blistering account of the School Facilities Impact Fee Waiver bill being considered in Annapolis today and tomorrow (read our first report on this). While the undergraduate and graduate student governments may not agree with the specific rhetoric in today’s Op-ed, they stand firmly with us in opposition to this and any plan that would drastically reduce the only incentive for student housing in the area. We’ll be in Annapolis tomorrow with student leaders to give testimony against the bill and propose a plan that takes into consideration the interests of the 35,000 UMD students that were never consulted during the bill’s drafting.

>>Diamondback - No End in Sight by David Daddio

Not far north on Route 1, just past the used-car dealerships, the psychic shop, the tattoo parlor, the rubble of a brothel and a restaurant that fell victim to an arson, sleeps a homeless man in a tent on a wooded lot. He’s taken up residency in our beautiful college town - College Park. Ironically, this man lives in the very same place that 630 graduate students were set to move to in August 2007 - the Mazza Grandmarc apartment complex. Instead, nearly 10 months after the project’s approval, the developer remains embroiled in a bitter fight over a little-known and little-understood law that gives incentives for off-campus student housing: the public school facilities impact fee waiver (henceforth referred to as the extortion fee waiver). Two committees in Annapolis are poised to reconsider (read: gut) the very same incentive this week with a bill championed by local elected officials.

In 2002, the state passed a law that shielded developers from new private student housing complexes from Prince George’s County’s $7,000 per-unit impact fee. All they need to do is build within 1.5 miles of the campus and contract with Shuttle-UM for bus service. It’s not uncommon for counties to shift the burden of building new public schools by levying such a one-time fee on new development. The extortion fee waiver is based on a fairly simple concept - you pay for what you use, and you don’t pay for anything you don’t need. Should we, as students of the university, have to foot the bill for local public schools even though the vast majority of us have no children, are not from Prince George’s County and more than likely will never live here upon graduation?

Local elected officials, not surprisingly, don’t see things the same way and have insisted on reducing the scope of the 2002 law since it went into effect without their consultation. Led by state Sen. Jim Rosapepe (D-Prince George’s and Anne Arundel) and the county delegation, with the support of the College Park City Council, they have proposed to rework and narrow the 1.5-mile standard. Basically, they are using the boundaries of the waiver zone to further their own agenda of minimizing new student housing along Route 1. What once extended from the campus to the Capital Beltway and clear around to Hyattsville has been reduced in the proposed legislation to effectively two places: the Knox Boxes south of the campus and the west side of Route 1 from the university’s Northgate to Route 193. The former is undergoing property consolidation, but large-scale development is years and years away. The latter is a prime area for student housing, but the land is already almost completely filled out with proposals for hotels and city-mandated owner-occupied condos.

If you’re thinking the extortion fee waiver is just giving away money to greedy developers, think again. Although the bill before the committees in Annapolis maintains the Mazza Grandmarc’s eligibility for the waiver, were the fee to be levied, it would cost that project’s developer nearly $1.8 million. Consider University View. If that project were to be built today, its 353 units would be subject to a more than $2.7 million fee. Because that money is so central to the financing of projects and the developers’ required profit margin, the waiver can mean the difference between build and no-go.

This bill implicitly tells the university that it should take up responsibility for student housing, but unfortunately, Annapolis has virtually foreclosed that option already by requiring the university’s dorms to be self-financing. Nothing could be more ironic than a full vote on this bill in Annapolis not even a month after student leaders and university administrators paraded through the Statehouse for Terrapin Pride Day. They reportedly chanted “Go Terps” and played up the university’s academic and athletic achievements while schmoozing with state officials. Now the same state officials, some of whom we voted into office on student-friendly platforms in November, are shamelessly and quietly chipping away our last best chance at decent, affordable housing.

Let this bill be a lesson to us all that political power is hoarded by a few to the detriment of many. That’s how it will always be until exposed to the light. This is especially true for college students who come to a place for a short time and have relatively weak, high-turnover political organizations. Absolutely no student leaders were consulted or in any way involved during the drafting of this bill. Who loses most from this legislation? Future students, of course, who are not around to mount any kind of fight.

Amid the worst housing crunch in recent memory, students are being squeezed out of housing from every direction: rent stabilization, owner occupancy requirements and now potentially a second and damaging blow from Annapolis - a complete gutting of the extortion fee waiver. College Park is on the threshold of a massive economic renaissance, yet, from everything I can tell, students are being left further and further behind. At least that homeless man on the Mazza property has somewhere to live.