A Man Is Thinking About Selling To A Fraternity, Even Though He Knows It Will Anger His Neighbors
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Imagine living in a college town, but you’re not a student or a professor. You’re a family who lives in a neighborhood with other families that don’t want student housing taking over their neighborhood.
If you decided to move, would you refuse to sell your house to a fraternity, or would you be willing to sell to anyone if the price is right?
In this story, one man is faced with that exact decision. He knows that selling to the fraternity would make his former neighbors mad, but he’s not sure he cares. He just sees dollar signs.
Let’s read all about it.
WIBTA for selling land to a fraternity after failing to organize neighbors to take measure to prevent “studentification” of our neighborhood?
A few years back, I and my family moved to a college town.
We were warned by people we knew who had lived there that we needed to be careful to pick a neighborhood that was not likely to be “studentified.”
The college in town has gone through periodic expansions in enrollment, but has never seemed interested in using its own land or resources to build sufficient student housing.
Here’s more context about the concerns with student housing.
The result was that student housing developers would come into a neighborhoods accessible to campus and engage in “blockbusting”.
Like lowball the saddest house on the street, submit plans to build student housing and then the realtors swarm in scaring the other owners that the street is going to be the next frat row.
And the fact is that students and families do have problems mixing as neighbors.
This was enough of a problem that the local zoning for some neighborhoods that would have otherwise been vulnerable had some restrictions that would make student housing impractical, but leave things otherwise unrestricted (largely limits on number of unrelated individuals living in a housing unit).
But the rules were about to change.
A year after moving in, we learned the city was doing a zoning overhaul – much needed. But as part of the simplication, the university’s persuasion managed to sneak in a provision getting rid of these limits.
When we learned of this, we figured maybe we could agree with our nearest neighbors to put in covenants/reciprocal easements that had same provisions being stripped out of zoning.
I was also most worried about vacant land.
So he took matters into his own hands.
There was one large parcel a block away, and I managed to buy it before the zoning change went through, so it was still relatively cheap.
To sweeten the deal for neighbors I was asking to sign covenants, I offered to keep the parcel vacant forever.
Unfortunately, I could not get a critical mass of people to agree – largely because many work for the college and seemed afraid of blowback if the school found out.
They didn’t want to live there forever.
Honestly, my kids and I never loved the town.
My wife wanted to be near her mom and sister.
MIL died last year and sister then said she was moving away.
That was enough and we sold our house and left.
He’s thinking about selling the lot to a fraternity.
I did not manage to sell the empty lot, but put it on the market.
Lo and behold, I was approached by a buyer. Turns out, this buyer is a fraternal organization, and they want the land to be their new chapter house. They may subdivide and sell the resulting new plot to another frat or sorority. They are willing to pay up.
I warned the neighbors this could happen and tried to protect the neighborhood, but they weren’t motivated enough to go through with it. And we don’t live there anymore.
But some former neighbors have heard this may be happening and now they are reaching out via email/text and complaining and moaning. WIBTA if I said, “match the buyer’s price, or they get the land and can do as the please”?
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Yikes! He is definitely going to make his former neighbors mad if he sells to the fraternity, but should he care?
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person thinks he should let the fraternity buy it.
Another person has a suggestion of what to say to the former neighbors.
Another person would do the same thing.
This is a good point.
If they were in his shoes, I bet his neighbors would sell to the highest bidder. He shouldn’t feel like he has to turn down the best offer just to humor his former neighbors.
Good riddance!
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