Hillegass Parker House
57 Singles - 57 Residents
2545 Hillegass Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704
Limited to graduate student and re-entry (age 25 or older) students only. Students need to verify their eligibility before they can be assigned.
Hillegass Parker House (HiP) is unlike any other place you are likely to live. It is a home, a safe haven, a community, an experiment, and many other things. This house is a place for friendship, creativity, insight, and self-edification. You can learn to cook, play well with others, try a new hobby, or learn about a topic completely unrelated to your work but that sparks all the light bulbs in your head.
Generally, we are a group of intelligent, civically-engaged, quasi-hippies. This description is not exhaustive. Here are some other true things about the community you are entering: We like ideas and nerd out about various esoteric topics. Students from a variety of programs call HiP home, including city planning, public health, medicine, law, acupuncture, physics, and many more. We eat avocados. We care about fairness. We hug all the trees. We send ridiculous emails. We inappropriately “reply all” on those emails. We sing “Wagon Wheel” and “Hallelujah” at every event involving guitars. Guitars appear at most events.
In large part, the strength of this community and the benefits it confers on its members come from the degree of everyone’s engagement with and openness to others. HiP is an inclusive community of students who cooperate to make a household work. Because of inevitable turnover every term, our community constantly renews itself and decides explicitly and implicitly what our core values are. Your actions and attitudes will therefore make up in large part who, what, and how this community is. The veteran Hippos you will meet are students like you, and sometimes limited in time and brain space, but engage wholeheartedly in the community endeavor. We also love having conversations about how to be human, and are careful to disagree respectfully.
Come by for dinner and see what HiP is all about!