It might be a little educational to look at how one landlord collects more than $10,000 per month in rent from young people who have "no money."
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washingtonpost.com
Saying Goodbye to Roommates -- All 12 of Them
By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 2, 2003; Page B01
Victoria Guroian was alone in the six-bedroom house, surrounded by only the overwhelming fumes of pine-scented disinfectant.
"It's never smelled this clean before," remarked the 21-year-old congressional intern from Culpeper, Va.
It was a rare moment of solitude. Guroian had spent all summer crammed into the three-story brick townhouse on Capitol Hill with a dozen -- yes, a dozen -- other interns.
Their numbers had dwindled as August slipped away. Instead of dodging roommates, Guroian found herself on a recent Friday sidestepping a large black trash bag and an old mop and bucket filled with dirty water. A cleaning crew attacked the house with a bottle of Lysol, a not-so-subtle hint that it was time for the last interns to move out.
More than half the original 13 had left already. Guroian was taking off that night, and by last week they were all gone.
"In the beginning, we were all fired up, and we came here on ideological pilgrimages," said Guroian, who returned to Washington and Lee University after her unpaid internship. "That became exhausting."
The tide of Washington interns has turned. No statistics are kept on the number of eager workers who flood the city each year, but estimates range from 15,000 to 20,000. Many begin to trickle in around Memorial Day, and the numbers peak in June and early July. Then, by Labor Day, they are heading home -- a little older, a little wiser . . . and in many cases, completely broke.
Call it Washington's version of MTV's "The Real World," complete with celebrity senator spottings, heated debates over national policy, and kitchens that somehow refuse to stay clean.
When it comes to housing interns, the D.C. philosophy seems to be the more the merrier. This summer, many universities and formal internship programs piled their students, two or more to a room, into tiny townhouses and apartments across the city. There are no single rooms at the George Washington University dorms, which housed about 3,500 interns, so they chose among doubles, triples and even quadruples.
Guroian and her roommates, who shared the $10,600 monthly rent for their Capitol Hill house, welcomed a friend who moved in halfway through the summer and slept on the floor. After all, when five people are sharing a bathroom, what's one more?
"Most of the [interns] like to live with the others," said Linda Bayer, director of the Washington Internship Program, which places hundreds of students each year. "They do get sort of an instant community."
At the house on the Hill, Guroian and eight other women took over the top two floors, where they turned the wet bar into a virtual beauty salon. The four guys lived in the basement, where the television stayed locked on ESPN.
The cast of characters included a modest midwesterner and a Georgia party girl. One intern worked at a lobbying firm that promotes abortion rights; another was vehemently opposed to abortion. "We're kind of a weird sort of family," said Gretchen Wieman, 23, of Anchorage.
The 13 interns were the first group to live in the townhouse, which for two decades had been used by a lobbying firm. Their antics -- how did that brick wall in front of the house fall down? -- are nothing new to the bustling neighborhoods of Capitol Hill, though. Four other townhouses nearby are rented year-round to interns.
Bob Lewis, 71, lives in the heart of it all. He owns the house that Guroian and company lived in, along with 11 other Capitol Hill properties that he rents out each season, almost exclusively to interns.
Lewis started the practice about 1995 as a favor to his wife, Jackie. Her alma mater, Marquette University, was looking for a place to house students coming to Washington for internships at the Les Aspin Center for Government. The Lewises offered a townhouse they owned on East Capitol Street NE.
When those interns arrived, Bob Lewis invited them for dinner. He kept buying property, and the interns kept coming, not only from Marquette but from colleges across the country. In 2001, he founded Washington Intern Student Housing with three other property owners to manage 26 houses on the Hill. This summer, 325 interns were tenants.
Lewis still invites them all over for dinner. He keeps an eye out for the interns as he waters his lawn and walks to his car. Some of them still keep in touch. They send letters and Christmas cards to him and his wife. One sent them a college term paper he had written after his internship. A couple who met and fell in love over one summer sent a wedding invitation several years ago. Two more former interns are getting married in December.
"You hear from them," Bob Lewis said. "They knock on the door and say, 'Hi, what's going on?' "
Sometimes the interns hear from him as well. That can be a good thing, such as when the Lewises sent Guroian and her roommates a dozen red roses to celebrate their final days in their house. The flowers found a prominent place on the kitchen counter, next to the Yellow Pages and a roll of toilet paper.
It can also be a not-so-good thing, such as the time Lewis spotted them on the roof of the house and called the police to shoo them down. "It's not safe," he said.
If only he knew about the time the young women hurled a chair down the stairs to block the basement door because the guys were stealing food. Or about the broken dishes, or the time the interns drank bourbon out of teacups -- and, in a fit of desperation, the sugar bowl -- because they didn't have shot glasses.
But as Guroian hauled her clothes away on that recent Friday, the stories were history. In two hours, roommate Tara Di Trolio, 20, would be at Reagan National Airport, waiting to fly back to Memphis.
There was still time for some drama. Di Trolio's checking account was overdrawn -- too many Cosi sandwiches -- and she didn't have enough cash to pay for a taxi. The Rhodes College student, who spent the summer as an unpaid intern at Government Executive magazine, trudged upstairs to her bedroom. She plopped her faux Prada purse on the bed and surveyed her luggage: a suitcase, two duffel bags, a comforter, a pillow and, still not packed, a hairdryer, CDs, candles and a box of detergent.
"Do you think I can lug this all onto a Metro?" she asked.
Leslie Capstick, 22, a recent graduate of the University of Denver, walked into the room sipping an iced coffee. Her plane was leaving the next night, and she had shed a few tears while at Starbucks. The three women huddled together to look at photos from the summer, nostalgic before they had even left.
Capstick had never lived outside Denver, her home town. She never even considered leaving until she heard about an internship at C-SPAN. Now the 13 roommates had seen Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at the gym and gotten an autograph from Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a Democratic presidential candidate.
"I don't want to limit myself to Denver" anymore, Capstick said quietly.
"Oh, you're going to make me cry," Di Trolio said.
The reverie was broken when the property managers walked into the room. They had stopped by to check out the house and do inventory. The cleaning crews would keep working in the next few days until all signs of the interns' presence were Cloroxed out. A new crop was waiting to move in.
"It's such a trip," Di Trolio said earlier. "I don't know how we're going to go home."
This is the last article of the series "The Intern Capital." Previous stories in the series, which explored the diverse experiences of Washington area interns, can be found at www.washingtonpost.com/metro.
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