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Here's what happened at Texas. Those beautiful old, substantial homes you saw were at the end of their useful lives in the 1960s. They suffered from cramped quarters, bad wiring, ancient construction, high maintentnece costs. The 1950s and 1960s were years of great prosperity for Greeks, and so many chapters made plans to rebuild modern new structures to accomodate increased chapter sizes and lower the cost of maintenence & repair.
Unfortunately, two things happened in the course of ten years: first, the architecture chosen tended to be the trendy, faddish, inexpensive style of the time instead of the traditional-looking greek house. That "modern" style passed quickly from favor and became very uninspiring and indistinguishable, like "ranch" style homes. The second thing that happend was that Greek member ship took a sharp nosedive from 1969 through about 1973, and some chapters that had mortgaged themselves to pay for new construction in the 1960s lost their homes due to low membership.
A few fraternitis at Texas have invested in new, traditional-style construction (Sig Ep for instance), and SAE has built a new compound, not in the traditional style but substantial and impressive. Fiji has a unique situation as their home is a historical landmark. But too many fraternities got burned so badly before that they do things like rennovate apartment complexes (i.e. planning for failure). What woyld really help the UT Greek system is if an area of land could be set aside for new housing and the fraternities could create a sort of Greek Park, but the administration is liberal and the chance of that happening is probably not great.
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