When Members Won't Live In
 

We've heard a lot lately about members who refuse to live in the house the year they're supposed to. What happens? Do they quit? Are they fined?

As a member who did not love living in the chapter house back in the days of the cold dorm, I think the chapters who have adapted to culture change will survive. For instance, one chapter on my campus will allow members to find someone else to live in their spot. They can pay a live out fee, recruitment a PNM who will live in, or do a semester split with a sister who is studying abroad. Also, NPC needs to stop making campus total largest chapter size plus 5. That hurts chapters at universities where the enrollment is dropping or Title IX is causing a drop in women's sport. Average chapter size was perfect because the PNM pool is finite and every chapter on campus should not have to COB. It's like telling the women in the chapter, "yay, you made quota, now add XX more." It's like there is no time to celebrate the successful completion of formal recruitment.

At my campus of greek initiation, chapter total has lowered significantly over the past ten years (and not rebounded). Ninety-five percent of their total greek housing is 50-70 years old, built in and modernized for the era of much larger greek memberships.

So you bet their chapters struggle when women do not choose to.live in greek housing, as they told is required long before being initiated.

In my day the sisters who chose not to live-in were asked to become alumnae, thus sadly missing out on the rest of their collegiate greek years.

In addition, during my era any campus greek chapter with extra bedspace was required to fill it with women known to the university as needing a place to live.

Most unfilled houses attempted to find their own 'independent' women to live-in, likely friends who would hopefully become future sisters. It always became uncomfortable when any 'independent' live-in joined a different greek house, but were still contracted to live in yours.

My chapter and the majority of the other Panhellenic chapters at CSU Long Beach are fortunate that this is rarely an issue due to a lack of student housing. The university is still considered to be a commuter campus but there's a real need for additional student housing and Greek housing is much less expensive.


However, the reasons that I have heard cited before are: 1.Cost 2. Lack of understanding regarding the live in agreement. 3. Members want to be able to drink, smoke, have romantic partners stay over etc...which the housing rules prohibit.

I know a lot of chapters are stuck with empty bed fees if the house isn't full.

As a current corporation board dealing with this I can tell you what I'm seeing on our campus. Chapters are doing what they can to reduce capacity, eliminating some/all of their porches, letting go of annexes, negotiating a lower capacity with the chapter, one chapter just moved into a new facility with a capacity of about half of the largest facilities.

Empty bed fees/special assessments are not uncommon. Some chapters charge live-outs a higher amount, but it's a balancing act - too high and the members (threaten to) drop, to low and there's no incentive to live-in.

While largest chapter plus (we were able to do just +1 this fall) works on the surface, NPC needs to realize it's not a one size fits all situation. We're one of 2 campuses where our new members move in on bid day; this results in a frantic scramble of COB starting on bid day trying to pick up new members before they're locked into their dorm contracts. And since the PNMs generally know everyone will be participating in COB we have a lot of withdrawals from formal recruitment when they don't get invited back to their favorites because "I can just join my favorite through COB".

My late friend was an AZD. Our campus did not have AZD at that time. She was allowed to move into our house to fill our one empty space.

Maybe it's time to start relaxing some of the rules.