USCA hacker house

Chateau co-op really is a special place in Berkeley. I don't know if I would want to live there myself, but I think it's the sort of place we need. You can spend hours there just absorbing the drawings on the walls. Unfortunately Chateau is the biggest headache for the USCA as well, with twenty-two neighbors banded together in an evil conspiracy to take Chateau off the map. And there are clearly problems at Chateau; very few people have taken contracts to live there in the fall.

Some of the proposals are patently ridiculous — such as to convert it to grad student housing or women-only housing. This would destroy Chateau, and there are already too many female vacancies in the USCA. Better plans involve various plans for "revitalization," which might or might not work. Protagonists cite Casa Zimbabwe as a success story; antagonists cite renovation at Cloyne as less-than-sucessful. Another proposal is to split the house — which is physically three houses, side by side — into three distinct co-ops, which would have the advantage of boosting personal responsibility in any given house. But I have not gone to any of the meetings about the Chateau situation, so I don't know what is being seriously considered.

I can't help but think this might be a good opportunity to put one of my pet project ideas into the general consciousness: designate one of the Chateau houses as a hacker house engineering theme house. We have a grad student house, two women-only houses, an african-american themed house, a queer house, and a vegetarian house. I think an engineering house could be particularly interesting. We don't have one (although CZ might come close in spirit). Engineering/tech themed houses have achieved considerable success and notoriety at other schools. MIT has ΤΕΦ. Caltech has Blacker House. Brown University has Technology House.

An engineering themed house would provide an environment (a great place) in which the housemates would collaborate on their assorted crazy projects. This could even be a resource for the USCA, as such a house could be a development center for useful co-op technologies, such as solar energy, or the planned co-op to co-op wireless network. The main resource at the house would of course be the collaborative powers of the residents, but I am sure the ensuing accumulation of equipment (tools, components) would also be very handy. Combining the house with an arts theme could have particularly interesting results. A major goal is to foster engineering culture.

I think that it would be great to have such a house in Berkeley, and as part of the USCA in particular, and perhaps the situation with Chateau is a good opportunity to begin talking about this idea, even if it's not implemented at Chateau. (As I said, I think Chateau itself is an important place that needs to preserved, and not razed from the face of this city, as the neighbors would have it.)

P.S. Check out this awesome directory of bay-area cooperative housing. PS2. On another note, why don't we have any kind of inter-coop electronic bulletin board / mailing list, so that we can correspond easily with the coopers at schools nearby (UCSC) or far away (UMich co-ops)?

Psst! Party at Oscar Wilde tomorrow!