At my small, liberal arts school the fraternities used to have houses. The sororities have never had houses. We have a chapter room on the ground floor of a dorm, a communal kitchen, and archive/lounge space in the basement. Before WWII, the fraternities owned houses off-campus. In 1954, the school decided it wished to become more residential in nature. It persueded them to sell their houses and give the money to the school to build a Quad on campus. This was done in exchange for guaranteed occupancy of the houses, in perpetuity. Other campus organizations could apply for a one-year theme house contract. In 1998 the sororities applied for equal housing status under Title IX. This caused a mild uproar. Then the campus Christian organization (among other groups) raised the issue that if the fraternities and sororities were to be guaranteed housing, so should every other campus organization that wanted it. Our school formed a Task Force on Residence Life that investigated for several years and came back at the end of the 2000-2001 school year with the decision to crawl through one of several large loopholes in the original fraternity contracts and declare that no organization has guaranteed right to a group house. The fraternities consulted with their attorneys and realized that there was really nothing they could do. A new program was implemented to begin in the 2002-2003 school year. To find out what happened, check out my post in
this thread.
The tricky part here is that my school is now a completely residential campus. You may only live off-campus if you:
1) live with family, are married, divorced, widowed, or have a child;
2) own a house (you personally, not your organization);
3) are student teaching;
4) are more than 4 years out of high school/over 25
5) have other special circumstances approved by the Dean of Residence Life and the financial aid department.
Therefore, the GLOs can't simply declare that we're going to build or buy houses off-campus and move into them. It doesn't work that way. By being a student at this university, you agree to abide by the residential campus arrangement.
So no, we don't have houses. At least not offically. But a girl can dream, can't she?
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