The Pink House: Possibly the Best, Little-Known & Almost-Secret Dorm in Princeton

 In a land far, far away, there lies Forbes. And right next to Forbes, on 99 Alexander Street, there is the Pink House (literally, a pink house). The house is owned by the University, and is part of Forbes College. About ten students separately draw into the Pink House each year.Come Fall 2016, however, the Pink House will become home to an eco-friendly experiment.Gavin Hall ’18 and nine other rising juniors will transform the house into a testing ground for low-cost sustainability projects. They will grow their vegetables in the Forbes Garden next door and potentially even raising chickens for eggs.Hall and his future housemates were awarded the Pink House after Forbes College fielded student proposals to form a “living and learning community” that would “promote the use of...campus as a living laboratory” for sustainability-oriented goals.“A lot of traditional environmental activism focuses on individual action, like turning off lights and eating less meat,” Hall explained. But this individually-focused approach is “pretty mathematically ineffective” and also “inaccessible to a lot of people” because of the economic costs involved.Hall's group intends to make environmentalism affordable. “We recognize a classism inherent in the eco movement and wish to counteract it; we hope to show...that an environmentally friendly lifestyle doesn’t need to break the bank, and that green, social solutions to life’s problems are accessible to almost everyone,” Hall’s group wrote in their winning proposal.Big plans are in store for the house. In addition to cultivating their own vegetables and raising chickens, they intend to monitor and measure the environmental impact of the house using metrics like their electricity and water use, and waste output. They also plan to work with elementary school students from Trenton, inviting them to plant food in the garden and cook in the Pink House kitchen.The Pink House project is going to be “so completely different than anything that’s ever been done on Princeton campus before,” Hall said. “I’m really excited to see how that turns out.”-MH