It was just last year, on a fine Autumn afternoon, I was relaxing on the scenic porch of 70 Park St., also known as the Green House theme cottage. I was reading a book and enjoying my new home’s beautiful porch swing; that was, until it fell and slammed violently to the floor.

“Hey guys, yeah, the porch swing fell again!” I shouted. This was not the first time our swing had fallen, but it would be the first time Facilities could not put it back up. They had deemed the roof of our porch too rotten and far too unstable for any new developments.

We would never swing again. And in my first semester living in the Green House, I would come to realize that our home is in a state of disrepair.

A bit of background on the Green House- our house was formed to be an environmental and sustainability-based space for people with similar, low-impact driven values, but after many years of operation, we have transformed into more.

Currently, we run workshops ranging in subjects from homemade cooking to environmental education to preserving foods to farming experiences and so on.

Each member of the house also cooks vegetarian meals once a week that we offer to students looking for Dana alternatives. We run the annual “Folk Fest” concert every April and we do “Pumpkin Palooza” every October.

We farm, we try to reduce our footprints as students and we care about what we do. But it is becoming clear to us that we may soon be a thing of the past. Our house is in shambles.

Let me share with you what is wrong with the Green House. First off, our house is painted with green paint, which is partly how we got our name. This green paint, while it is “fun,” is also peeling away from our house’s rotten shingles faster than you can say “vegan beet brownies!”

Did I mention that it is lead paint? In fact, one student has said that the paint on our house had to be diluted 1000 times before the lead detectors of our chemistry department could even read the levels because it was “off the charts” toxic. Lead paint chipping off our house and into our soil and rivers? That’s not very green at all!

There are many other “fun” aspects of our home, including, but not limited to, the kitchen countertop rotting away from the wall and the all too frequent flooding of our basement, but the kicker has got to be the infamous second-floor shower. One of our upstairs showers has a rotting floor- you can feel how rotten it is when you step on it. You can even see down to the first floor from that bathroom via holes. It is only a matter of time before the shower gives and somebody falls through.

We have asked for repairs, but instead of a repair, we were simply told that we would not be charged for damages if one of us fell down to the first floor. I suppose for now we’ll have to continue to take our maintenance man’s half joking advice and take showers “with our arms propped out” so that we don’t get swallowed by the failing infrastructure!

We here at the Green House love what we do and are very grateful that we have a reliable platform to promote positive ideas on this campus, but we are afraid. We are afraid that all our house’s 20+ year history will be forgotten if 70 Park Street crumbles away for good. We hear mumblings that the administration is just going to let our house break down and not repair it. We hear mumblings that there is too much work and we can’t be saved. All we want to do is continue serving the community, so enough with the mumblings. It’s time to get some straight answers.