Nearly 20 members of Tufts' Delta Upsilon (DU) fraternity were forced to find alternative housing for the past three weeks while their house was being repaired to comply with city inspections not completed at the beginning of the semester.
Approximately 18 students, many of them football players engaged in preseason training, moved in with other DU members living off campus or took advantage of empty dorm rooms offered by the Office of Residential Life and Learning, according to DU President John Rinciari.
After an inspection yesterday, DU has collected four of the five signatures needed to clear the house for reoccupation. Since the beginning of the month, brothers have had only limited access, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and have not been permitted to stay in the house overnight, according to Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman. Reitman served last year as the interim director of fraternity and sorority affairs.
Reitman said that such situations are not uncommon and usually are resolved within a month. "I don't recall that ever it's been more than the first three or four weeks of school that anybody's been out," Reitman said.
Still, three weeks of homelessness were an inconvenience.
"It was tough because we were in the middle of preseason and obviously a lot of our guys play football and we needed a place to stay," Rinciari said. "It was just an issue, like, none of the issues at DU were life−threatening, they were just things that needed to be done that the city requires."
Rinciari, a junior, said the required repairs were minor and included fixing smoke alarms, replacing old exit signs and repairing leaky pipes.
Both Reitman and Rinciari underscored the fact that the university does not own DU's house and that similar situations have happened in the past. The house is owned by the fraternity's national organization.
"We had inspection in late August and we had some small issues with the house that we were going to fix ourselves," Rinciari said. "But the inspectors said that [we needed permits for] the things ... so we had to get contractors to come in and do the work instead of us doing it."
The City of Somerville requires that a building's owner obtain five separate signatures from the fire department, police department, electrical inspector, health inspector and building inspector, according to Reitman.
The building has been cleared by police, and the electricity, health and building inspectors toured the residence yesterday, Rinciari said. The fire department is expected to visit the house today.
Most of the fraternities on campus are university−owned, and the university works with the City of Somerville to ensure inspections are carried out on time over the summer. But in non−university−owned houses, coordination becomes more difficult, according to Reitman.
"I don't blame the students; Its more the house corporations who own the property in these cases who are really the ones who are responsible for it," Reitman said. "It's not so much the students' fault as it is the owners of the property — in this case, the housing corporation."
"It's definitely something the owners of the house need to take care of in the future — not that they're negligent about it, but they also need to be more on top of it," Rinciari said. "It's both of our faults. I don't want to blame any particular people."
