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Hey D.0.7,
At UMass, in general, getting a house is a pain in the a**. There are 19 houses in Amherst with the proper zoning variances to be fraternity or sorority housing. (In Massachusetts, an exception to local zoning rules is called a variance, and they're granted by the town meeting.) It's virtually impossible to get the Amherst town meeting to grant variances for fraternity housing (they haven't issued one in 20+ years), so building a new house is out of the question. So you need to try to get into one of the 19 existing houses.
Since UMass has 42 GLO's, there's constant competition for houses. All of the houses are privately owned- the university tries to have as little as possible to do with the GLO's, to avoid any legal responsibility for what we do. Of the 19 houses, 13 are owned by the national or the alumni corporation of the group that lives there, so those are always occupied. The other 6 break down like this: one owned by Sigma Sigma Sigma (which used to have a chapter, and is coming back someday), currently occupied by Alpha Delta Phi; one owned by Delta Chi, currently occupied by my chapter, Omega Delta; and four houses owned by Alpha Tau Gamma. Those four are smack in the middle of the row, in front of the main gate of the university- prime real estate. They change hands every couple semesters- ATG gives the houses to the chapters that they think are the surest source of cash. So getting a house at UMass basically consists of sucking up a lot to the ATG alumni corp.
As to how we got our house....ATG refused to rent to us, because they thought we were a bad bet. (On the cheery side, two of the chapters they did decide to rent to are now falling apart and unable to lease the house- I consider it just retribution for refusing us.) So it didn't look like we would get a house this year. But then Delta Chi got its chapter pulled- bad grades, low numbers, and then finally they got taken to housing court for violating the town fire code. So their house was empty. It occured to us to call the Delta Chi alumni corp. and ask if we could lease the house. We did a lot of work, spent about $6000 to bring it up to code, and now it's ours, at least for the year. The Delta Chi alumni are wavering between selling it and holding it for the day when they come back. If they sell it, we'll probably end up in one of the ATG houses in '03.
Wow, that was long. I hope it answered your question. Why are you curious about how our houses work?
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