Reflections on the Close of Le Chateau from a Former Resident
The Berkeley Daily Planet has comments from someone who lived in Chateau from 1993 to 1995. Read the whole thing, or an excerpt:

We got lice. We got staph. We were temporarily brainwashed by an amateur cult leader. We paid our own way, took semesters off to travel and took in homeless veterans. We learned that, sadly, sometimes things do need to get worse before they get better...

In the early 1990s, when I lived in the three-house complex on Berkeley’s Hillegass Avenue, we weren’t shameless hippies and slackers—we were working it out. In a culture where middle-class, college-aged youth are expected to move far from home and achieve great things, self-sufficiency is top dollar. We were not ready to succumb to a decade of segregated apartment living, but neither could we get comfy in the ennui of towering dormitories.

We chose, instead, a living arrangement based on the principles of cooperation established by a group of weavers in Rochdale, England, in 1844. Those same principles have been adopted by thousands of residential, food and industry co-ops across the world...

Talking to current residents on a recent Saturday night, along with 25 or so alumni who joined together to watch the Last Chateau Sunset from the rooftop patio, I tried to find out what went wrong. “Was there really a meth lab in the basement?” I asked. Instead of confirming my worst fears—that the current generation was somehow louder, dirtier and less cooperative than us—these 20-somethings sounded a lot like me. They spoke passionately about the impact Le Chateau had on their worldview and their aspirations. They articulated clearly the Bay Area’s housing price crisis, conflicts between the co-op and its parent University Students Co-operative Association, and the ir own commitment to the house despite its problems.

The noise and detritus that emanate from Le Chateau’s grounds hide the important work going on among and between and inside its residents. As one fellow alum on the rooftop said, “It was at Chateau th at I learned to get along with people I can’t stand.” If only the neighbors had learned that lesson when they were in college...

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