Fullerton’s Rowdy Frat Row Needs Taming, Officials Say

Having a collection of fraternity houses for a neighbor has its moments, many of them bad. Just ask Amanda Tuccitto, who manages an apartment complex an empty beer keg’s toss from Cal State Fullerton’s frat row.

“There was an ongoing summer party. When summer ended, they celebrated that. Then they celebrated the start of school. Then there was rush,” said Tuccitto, whose 48 units in the Atlanta Pacifica apartments are separated from the fraternities by an alley. “It was quite something to behold.”

For 30 years, neighbors of the off-campus fraternities on Teri Place have contended with the flotsam of passing college weekends. Empty beer bottles littering lawns and broken furniture clogging the alley. Loud music filling the night air and illegally parked cars.

But the vandalism early this month of a fourplex rented by Sigma Pi fraternity went far beyond the street’s rowdy reputation. The Greek group was on suspension from the university and being evicted for not paying rent, when, police say, more than $100,000 in damage was done to the house during a final party. Holes were punched in walls; furniture, bathroom fixtures and windows were smashed and paint splattered inside and out.

The incident, which Fullerton police are investigating, stunned city and university officials, who now are discussing what can be done to bring order to a neighborhood where partying is a rite of passage and police respond to scores of complaints each year.

Meanwhile, fearing a crackdown, Greek members are trying to burnish their image, raising money for the owners of the trashed property and trying to distance themselves from what they say is a handful of troublemakers who have sullied their image. Plans for a traditional blowout to celebrate the end of the semester last weekend were canceled.

“I want to get rid of the stigma that all fraternities are like them,” said Rudie Baldwin, 20, president of the campus Interfraternity Council. “What I fear will happen is that people in political power will take this bad event and generalize it to say all fraternities are bad and try to get rid of us.”

The tension has long been brewing.

“It seems that every few years, there’s an event that goes beyond the tolerance level of the community,” Fullerton City Manager Chris Meyer said. “There’s a long, long history here.”

In the mid-1980s, a spike in complaints led the city to require recognized fraternities to obtain conditional use permits. These mandate fire inspections, limit occupancy and set other rules that officials concede aren’t always followed to the letter.

Nevertheless, the permit process has given the city a tool to limit the size of frat row and weed out the biggest troublemakers. The city forbids any new fraternity house from being within 1,000 feet of an existing one. And in the last decade, two fraternities were denied permits because of rowdy behavior, while another had its permit revoked by the City Council. Some homes now are regarded as “stealth fraternities” -- not officially recognized Greek houses, and therefore immune from the regulations. The vandalized Sigma Pi house had, in effect, become just that.

“We can’t discriminate against people wanting to live together,” said Joel Rosen, Fullerton’s chief planner. “If they comply with the basic housing laws and building codes -- which are pretty liberal -- they can operate close to the edge of being a fraternity ... without officially being one.”

Rosen said that in coming months, the city’s Neighborhood Enhancement Team -- a committee of police, fire, code enforcement and planning officials -- will discuss what more can be done on frat row. Strategies could include more proactive inspections for code violations and toughening the city’s permit code.

“I’m not sure there’s a solution,” Meyer said. “Even if you could legally run all the fraternities out, that would not solve the problem. It’s an area that has a high concentration of students, and students have parties.... All we can do is to try to keep things under control.”

Kandy Mink, the university’s acting dean of students, said meetings between fraternity members and residents in the community could be one answer.

“We have a responsibility to do something,” she said. “We have to be continually working, educating students in the community on what it means to be a good neighbor.”

Last weekend marked the end of the fall semester. Normally, Teri Place would have been awash in T.G.I.O -- Thank God It’s Over -- parties. This year, the weekend was quiet, police say.

“The Greek life advisor talked to the fraternity leadership and gave them advice,” Mink said of the decision to cancel the bash.

Baldwin, whose fraternity recently held a toga party -- outside the neighborhood -- took the advice to heart.

“We can’t do things like we did them before,” he said. “Everybody in the neighborhood is fed up. I don’t see a problem with that. Things are going to have to change.”