The house for the Delta Chi fraternity is currently under repair, and residents have been forced to move elsewhere, according to some of the fraternity’s members.
“I think the building wasn’t up to Boulder housing standards,” said Brendan Browne, 20, a junior environmental policy major.
Browne said that he lived at the house on 1135 11th Street but was not a member of the fraternity. He and other former residents interviewed in recent weeks told the same story of being called to a meeting by their landlord and told that they had to leave because of the condition of the house. According to city records, a permit was pulled on Jan. 26 for work on the waste water, electrical and roofing facilities of the house, although there is no record of the house being condemned at this time. After the shut down an electrical and roofing contractor were contacted to inspect the house to see if there were any possibilities of undergoing repairs.
“I guess if it was professionally inspected they would say it was a hazard,” Browne said. “It was like a situation where he was forced to tell everyone we had to move.”
Browne said he believes that a parent may have tipped off the city that the house was not up to code.
“I think a parent complained about the condition of the house,” Browne said.
On Friday, the house appeared to be vacant. The windows were boarded up and the sounds of construction work could be heard coming from inside.
“We had to be out by Feb. 8 and we found out about ten days before,” said Jordan Ries, a sophomore economics major and president of Delta Chi. “The structural foundation was inadequate . . . they just keep adding to the house,” Ries said before describing problems that had caused the foundation to “sink a little bit.”
Ries added that the problems stemming from adding onto the house weren’t just from recent landlords.
“This wasn’t just the fraternity, or landlords now, this was landlords going back twenty years ago,” Ries said.
Ries said that fraternity members have found new places to live for the time being. “We have first priority to go back to our old house,” Ries said, adding that “there are plenty of other [houses] that we’re looking at also.”
Ries said that the house has twenty six rooms, and both he and Browne estimated that about half of the residents were fraternity members.
The landlord could not be reached for comment.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Sam Dieter at Samuel.dieter@colorado.edu.
