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Originally Posted by bejazd
Could someone describe the greek housing/neighborhood at U-Texas for me? and the method for determining property taxes? (Never been there, I know nothing about Austin.) Somebody once described the houses there to me as "lodges" but from the few pics I've seen, they look more like traditional houses or modified apt buildings. To me a lodge is a meeting room with a kitchen/bath, an office, and maybe a house dir's room.
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Here at Texas there really are not any lodges per se. A couple of chapters have tried something like that but in today's market it does not work out.
Real estate is so expensive here that you have to house as many students as possible since chapter dues cannot possibly pay the costs for a house. Plus as time goes on there is more pressure (and I think this is a good thing) for fraternities to have more of their formally organized social functions offsite since it prevents damage and also- by virtue of a cleaner and less noisy environment- encourages more people to live in the house.
In 2004 a big chunk of West Campus- including most of the major Greek houses- was rezoned to allow for more skyward and dense development. This is a city-wide initiative targeted at several highly desireable areas close to downtown, not just West Campus. And in West Campus in particular it was important since the zoning was so outdated (meaning the # of residents per acre permitted was so low) that it was pretty much not worthwhile to build anything new.
The average Travis County property valuation up until 2004 for a UT fraternity house hovered around $800,000. As of 2006 the average is now just a few thousand dollars shy of $2.0 million. And SAE is the only property that underwent major improvements in that time. This increase is all about land value.
Property tax rates for the West Campus area were 2.5254% last year- so you can do the math from there and see just how bad property taxes are (prior to 2006 they ran around 2.75%.)
The bottom line is that most fraternity houses are located on land which is now zoned for 4-17 story high rise apartment buildings- and the value of the land reflects that potential development, not the fact that the land currently holds a single house making very inefficient use of the space.
In 2006, the most valuable fraternity house at UT was valued at $5.3 million. The lowest was about $663,000, and most fall in the $1.2-2.5 million range. In 2004, the most valuable fraternity house in West Campus came in at $1.26 million. It has changed that much that fast!
The larger chapters can afford this- but it has driven rent costs up strongly- plus it makes it harder for alumni to hold on to a house for future use if a chapter gets suspended or kicked off for a period of time.
Quite frankly, unless things change dramatically in the world of UT student housing- I think there is a good chance that fraternity houses as they exist today will be gone within 20 years. Already there are easily half as many of these houses as there were 15 years ago.
The future is more high-rise type chapter houses with individual apartments and a few common area rooms that can be readily coverted to rental use for the general student population if a chapter has trouble with numbers or probation for any period of time.
The basic costs to run these properties is just too high for alumni to cover the costs for a house to sit partially unoccupied when chapters go through natural low membership numbers at various times.