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Silicon Valley Techies Fight to Save a Popular but Illegal Haven

92 points by bluehat 14y ago

lhnn 14y ago
Let me end this conversation before it begins: "Why should the government tell me I need this many exits, or that I need a wheelchair ramp if no-one needs it?" "Because you're too short-sighted to see how important those things are. The government is watching out for you and those unfortunate enough to know you."
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  I actually can kind of understand a wheel chair ramp. You will never need it if you don't have one, because nobody with a wheel chair will ever come. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be in a wheelchair and kept out of so many places. The rest? Most of it sounds like a combination of people wanting to believe nothing bad can ever happen to them and the nanny state wanting to keep itself employed.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - araneae 14y ago
    As the new mother of a 3 month old, I'm really getting a taste of how much it must suck to be in a wheelchair. The stroller can't go into half the places I try to visit. Even the bank wasn't wheelchair accessible. And in many stores, even if they are on the ground floor, the aisles are too narrow to navigate.
- sown 14y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4xaWMKBlw4#t=25s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4xaWMKBlw4#t=25s
- DannyBee 14y ago
  It's hard not to feed a troll, so .... 1. Fire sprinklers were added to the IRC and IBC due to their ability to prevent fires (surprise!), in light of the fact that costs have come down significantly, and they can now make them look "not ugly". Fires aren't just going to damage your building, they'll damage the stuff you don't own as well. 2. The number and placement of fire exits is usually based on the distance one has to travel from any given occupied space, and the occupancy of the building. This distance is determined based on real numbers like how far you are likely to get before smoke inhalation kills you. Letting the probably non-existent free market sort this out by "the people who didn't die" learning to only frequent places that have sufficient fire exits seems like a bad strategy. 3. You probably don't remember the wonderful days before the ADA, when there weren't many wheelchair ramps, and people with wheelchairs were basically told to "suck it" everywhere they went (including, in some cases, government buildings).
  - rprasad 14y ago
    Additionally, fire kills people, as does the voluminous smoke it gives off. Fire exits are required to make sure people can exit a burning building within 3-7 minutes (varies by jurisdiction). This is based on an unfortunate history of tragedies involving people dying in fires, in which it was discovered that people who did not manage to escape in the first few minutes usually succumbed to the smoke.
  - saurik 14y ago
    To verify, you realize that the person you are responding to, whom I believe you have called a "troll", seems to quite clearly understand this, right? The first quote is "what a lot of people are saying", and the second quote is "the obvious response to that".
- untog 14y ago
  The Great Fire of London agrees with you.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Sigh, its not an 'illegal' haven it just isn't up to code. Which, unfortunately, you cannot sign a waiver that says I won't hold anyone responsible for me burning up in a fire here. And the Mtn View is kind of well known for being unhelpful in these regards.
- amcintyre 14y ago
  I tried scanning the article to find out what made it illegal, and was fairly disappointed to find that (once again) I'd been lured by a sensationalist headline.
  - onedev 14y ago
    It says right in the article what made it illegal. Take some goddamn time to read if you're that interested.
    - prodigal_erik 14y ago
      The title is supposed to tell us whether the article is worth reading. Most anyone who cares about Hacker Dojo already knew about their retrofit funding problem; there's little fresh news here.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    Yeah, the headline did make it sound like hackers were protecting The Pirate Bay headquarters or something... we should be able to downvote bad titles :)
    - neurotech1 14y ago
      Except the title is straight from the NY Times! I'm shocked they could publish a biased, misleading story.
      - ekianjo 14y ago
        I did not realise that. Wow, the NY times is really turning into a tabloid these days...
ramanujan 14y ago
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/384590180/an-events-space-and-a-design-studio-for-hacker-doj?ref=live http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/384590180/an-events-spac... ^ Chip in here if you are inclined to support fellow hackers. They need to raise $250,000: “If they can’t comply, they can’t use the building as they want to,” said Anthony Ghiossi, the chief building official for the city. Hacker Dojo opened without a permit, Mr. Ghiossi pointed out. It is currently prohibited from hosting events that draw more than 49 people in any one room, he said. That means no large classes or overly enthusiastic happy hours, which are a regular feature on Friday nights. Ellis Berns, the city’s assistant community development director, was eager to point out that Mountain View, which is home to tech giants like Google, did not wish to evict Hacker Dojo. “We try to be as supportive as we can,” he said. “Businesses spin out of there. We are not at all interested in them closing down.” But retrofitting the space will cost upward of $250,000, according to the Dojo’s estimate. It has so far raised $173,000, including donations from its neighbor, Google. This is as clean an example as you can get of regulations blocking innovation; a $250k fee just to get started, from the building that gave rise to Pinterest and Pebble. Compare and contrast to pg on "The Power of the Marginal": That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means there's lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There's a sharper line between outside and inside, and only projects that are officially sanctioned—by organizations, or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself—get proper indoor space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can't just tinker. You have to justify. In my opinion, in addition to donating, you should exercise your rights as a citizen and give these officials a piece of the public's mind. Their emails are below. It is very unusual for local officials like Ellis Berns and Anthony Ghiossi to actually have their bad decisions checked by bad publicity, but it's absolutely necessary in this case. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html [2] anthony.ghiossi@mountainview.gov [3] ellis.berns@mountainview.gov
- varelse 14y ago
  What I'm not seeing in these articles about this place is any sense of responsibility by Hacker Dojo's owners for not doing the due diligence to know what they were getting into in the first place. I don't consider well-intentioned cluelessness a barrier to innovation but your mileage may vary. Ellis Berns doesn't sound like a villain to me but rather just a guy in a tough situation. If the town of Mountain View doesn't enforce their codes here, and if something like the fire in the video posted here were to occur, they'd get their keesters sued out of their pants and rightly so. That said, it's not even a drop in the bucket of Silicon Valley's vast wealth to fix this so if it's worth saving, I suspect it will be saved.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
teffen 14y ago
Typical big government telling people how to live their lives. > No sprinklers. > No handicap access. On second thought...
- lambdasquirrel 14y ago
  Have you been to the dojo? Most of the life happens on the first floor. Also, most of the parties happen where there's a giant garage door. It's not like the second floor is lacking in ways down and out of the building. It's also a converted warehouse, not much to light up. Would sprinklers be nice? Sure. But the place is not exactly a disaster waiting to happen.
volaski 14y ago
I first hated this sensationalist headline, but on second thought think it's the best title ever. It achieved what it's supposed to do--get attention.
neurotech1 14y ago
Sensational headlines make it sound like they are the silicon valley mafia or something. I have never seen a more BS article in NY times. Hacker Dojo is one of the most respected hacker spaces on the planet. They try and do things as legally and 'up to code' as they can with the resources they have.
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
I think this just bureaucracy run amok. It's something from an 80s movie. Regulations have their place and I don't want to get into any discussion about "big government" but I think this is a bit too far for something that has become such a community icon. Also, I find it odd if they are already at $173K, I would think there would be several alums or those sympathetic that could shell out a measly $80K, that's a rounding error for many successful programmers in SV. Also, I agree with others that the headline was ridiculous. By this standard, many people's middle class homes are "illegal" for one reason or another. However, one positive of the sensationalist headline is it might make people pay more attention and possibly donate.
- rprasad 14y ago
  Or, you know, they could have just made sure the building was up to code first, like every other business, organization, and individual. Being a startup does not give them carte blanche to ignore basic laws of society, especially not laws which address actual safety concerns. [Of relevance to Hacker Dojo: see pretty much every mass casualty club/nightclub tragedy of the past decade, in which dozens died in each instance due to code violations.] More importantly: if someone had gotten hurt or died in Hacker Dojo as a result of a code violation, all of their officers would be facing criminal negligence charges.
  - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    It's hard to argue that point. I'm under the assumption that they didn't know what it would turn into when they started. They definitely were taking on certain liability.
  - bluehat 14y ago
    We had an old permit which did not require these things, only a fire alarm system (which costs $35K and we had installed).
rdl 14y ago
In the case of Hacker Dojo, it has big warehouse-style roll-up doors. If the issue were fire safety and egress, an interim policy of only allowing events >49 people when the roller doors are raised seems reasonable. $250k isn't a huge amount of money, so I don't think there's a huge risk of them getting shut down. Especially given that the space itself is inherently handicap accessible, I don't think ADA bathrooms should be a pressing requirement. Yes, they should have them, but it's not sufficient to deter handicapped people from attending, and it doesn't hurt the value of the space to the majority of non-handicapped attendees.
T_S_ 14y ago
Nice article by NYTimes. Too bad about the linkbait headline, but, hey, they have to sell clicks too. At Hacker Dojo, we're working hard to raise the money so everyone can just get back to writing code, safely egressing etc.
nateabele 14y ago
This is rent-seeking, plain and simple. As municipalities slide ever closer toward insolvency, expect to see these spurious regulations enforced and enacted, ostensibly fronted by bleeding-heart do-gooders, but with the express intent to extort as much money as possible from productive individuals.
- objclxt 14y ago
  This whole thread just saddens me. I suspect very few people here are qualified to talk about this. It is not "rent-seeking, plain and simple". I speak from experience, as I've carried out many risk assessments against buildings for live events. Fire and building codes exist for a very specific reason: to save lives and prevent injury. If you think being forced to install sprinklers is somehow 'rent-seeking' perhaps you should remember that the Rhode Island Station nightclub fire (in which 100 people died) could have had significantly less impact had sprinklers been installed (as the building code specified). There are too many examples to count of fires where lives have been lost as a result of inadequate prevention and control systems. You may not like the fact that these systems cost money to install and maintain. You may not also like the fact that in most states that vast majority of commercial buildings require them. But they are very much not 'spurious' regulations.
- lilsunnybee 14y ago
  Yeah no. Rent-seeking would be asking $250,000 just for the permit to run their hacker-space. The city is only requiring that their public space be safe and accessible, not telling them the contractors they should hire and where they are required to spend their money. Heck if the dojo members were dedicated and diligent enough they could do most of the work themselves, probably for a lot less than the estimates they've received. Frankly i don't see where any of this outrage is coming from. They've already raised most of what they need from private donations. It seems unlikely they will actually be shut down. If they were somehow unable to raise the few tens of thousands more they needed to get up to code, it would be due to the greed and stinginess of the well-off so-called pro-business types in the bay area. If tech investors cared a fraction as much about promoting startups and the economy as a whole as getting equity and a solid return on their investment, fund-raising for this sort of thing would be ridiculously easy. Alas most all wealthy individuals are stingy as hell; they might give you $100 if you kiss their feet and carve their name in stone. Otherwise go back to your ghetto and quit bothering them.
adastra 14y ago
When I saw the headline I thought data haven. Hilariously over-hyped headline. What is the NY Times coming to these days?
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
<rant>So the guys in the dojo could build their own airplane, go out in the desert, and fly it and kill themselves. The world is happy with them. They could learn to SCUBA dive. Heli-ski. Become a wild animal tamer. But they can't sit around in the evenings and create things that change the world in a particular building because it doesn't meet code and therefor might be dangerous. Better than that, they could use the facilities even in a state of disrepair, and they did for a long time. It's only now that it has been inspected that suddenly it becomes dangerous. I think the city has an obligation here to prevent people from getting hurt -- unknowingly. You shouldn't walk into an unsafe building without knowing it. But once you put a big red sign up on the door, as long as there is no danger to surrounding buildings or people, leave the guys alone. To top it off, we have this quote: "We try to be as supportive as we can...Businesses spin out of there. We are not at all interested in them closing down" Bullshit. This is the classic Nuremberg defense: we're only following the system. Politicians are voted into office to make decisions, and they could have a wavier created in an hour if the right strings were pulled. This is just a matter of hackers not having a strong local political voice. (I do not like the system being broken in a way such that squeaky activists get special treatment, but it is what it is) Hell, the city should be paying itself for the building to be brought up to code. There shouldn't even be a question about it being a problem for the coders to solve on their own. What the hell kind of priorities do they have out there? They have a place successfully spinning off startups and they're fucking around with it? Other cities would kill for something like that. I just find it amazing that the parks and streets in the Bay Area are full of people living a catch-as-catch-can existence. There's rampant drug use, violent crimes, and so on. Perhaps if we were concentrating on public safety and helping the most number of people, instead of working in silos, we would be doing other, more important things?</rant>
imgabe 14y ago
I'm assuming Hacker Dojo does not actually own the building and is leasing the space. Why isn't the building owner being held at least partially accountable for bringing the space up to code? I'm guessing it wasn't detailed in their lease, but how long is the lease for? Is there a possibility of breaking it and finding a building that does meet the requirements for how they want to use it? Also, in most jurisdictions I've worked in, requirements to bring bathrooms up to ADA are not triggered unless you're already doing renovations over a certain amount in the building. Maybe here it's because the use type of the space is changing, though.
- bluehat 14y ago
  They busted us less than a week after signing a 3 year lease. In California, there are no protections when you do a commercial lease to make sure the space is legal for you to use. The tenant is responsible for making the space usable.
xfhai 14y ago
It was a glass factory, so why not ask permission to exist as a factory. Maybe there would be lesser requirements. Hackerspace is not really an office.
- bluehat 14y ago
  The concern is that we teach classes, which people don't do in a glass factory.

92 points by bluehat 14y ago

lhnn 14y ago

Let me end this conversation before it begins: "Why should the government tell me I need this many exits, or that I need a wheelchair ramp if no-one needs it?" "Because you're too short-sighted to see how important those things are. The government is watching out for you and those unfortunate enough to know you."

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
I actually can kind of understand a wheel chair ramp. You will never need it if you don't have one, because nobody with a wheel chair will ever come. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be in a wheelchair and kept out of so many places. The rest? Most of it sounds like a combination of people wanting to believe nothing bad can ever happen to them and the nanny state wanting to keep itself employed.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- araneae 14y ago
  As the new mother of a 3 month old, I'm really getting a taste of how much it must suck to be in a wheelchair. The stroller can't go into half the places I try to visit. Even the bank wasn't wheelchair accessible. And in many stores, even if they are on the ground floor, the aisles are too narrow to navigate.
sown 14y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4xaWMKBlw4#t=25s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4xaWMKBlw4#t=25s
DannyBee 14y ago
It's hard not to feed a troll, so .... 1. Fire sprinklers were added to the IRC and IBC due to their ability to prevent fires (surprise!), in light of the fact that costs have come down significantly, and they can now make them look "not ugly". Fires aren't just going to damage your building, they'll damage the stuff you don't own as well. 2. The number and placement of fire exits is usually based on the distance one has to travel from any given occupied space, and the occupancy of the building. This distance is determined based on real numbers like how far you are likely to get before smoke inhalation kills you. Letting the probably non-existent free market sort this out by "the people who didn't die" learning to only frequent places that have sufficient fire exits seems like a bad strategy. 3. You probably don't remember the wonderful days before the ADA, when there weren't many wheelchair ramps, and people with wheelchairs were basically told to "suck it" everywhere they went (including, in some cases, government buildings).
- rprasad 14y ago
  Additionally, fire kills people, as does the voluminous smoke it gives off. Fire exits are required to make sure people can exit a burning building within 3-7 minutes (varies by jurisdiction). This is based on an unfortunate history of tragedies involving people dying in fires, in which it was discovered that people who did not manage to escape in the first few minutes usually succumbed to the smoke.
- saurik 14y ago
  To verify, you realize that the person you are responding to, whom I believe you have called a "troll", seems to quite clearly understand this, right? The first quote is "what a lot of people are saying", and the second quote is "the obvious response to that".
untog 14y ago
The Great Fire of London agrees with you.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Sigh, its not an 'illegal' haven it just isn't up to code. Which, unfortunately, you cannot sign a waiver that says I won't hold anyone responsible for me burning up in a fire here. And the Mtn View is kind of well known for being unhelpful in these regards.

amcintyre 14y ago
I tried scanning the article to find out what made it illegal, and was fairly disappointed to find that (once again) I'd been lured by a sensationalist headline.
- onedev 14y ago
  It says right in the article what made it illegal. Take some goddamn time to read if you're that interested.
  - prodigal_erik 14y ago
    The title is supposed to tell us whether the article is worth reading. Most anyone who cares about Hacker Dojo already knew about their retrofit funding problem; there's little fresh news here.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  Yeah, the headline did make it sound like hackers were protecting The Pirate Bay headquarters or something... we should be able to downvote bad titles :)
  - neurotech1 14y ago
    Except the title is straight from the NY Times! I'm shocked they could publish a biased, misleading story.
    - ekianjo 14y ago
      I did not realise that. Wow, the NY times is really turning into a tabloid these days...

ramanujan 14y ago

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/384590180/an-events-space-and-a-design-studio-for-hacker-doj?ref=live http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/384590180/an-events-spac... ^ Chip in here if you are inclined to support fellow hackers. They need to raise $250,000: “If they can’t comply, they can’t use the building as they want to,” said Anthony Ghiossi, the chief building official for the city. Hacker Dojo opened without a permit, Mr. Ghiossi pointed out. It is currently prohibited from hosting events that draw more than 49 people in any one room, he said. That means no large classes or overly enthusiastic happy hours, which are a regular feature on Friday nights. Ellis Berns, the city’s assistant community development director, was eager to point out that Mountain View, which is home to tech giants like Google, did not wish to evict Hacker Dojo. “We try to be as supportive as we can,” he said. “Businesses spin out of there. We are not at all interested in them closing down.” But retrofitting the space will cost upward of $250,000, according to the Dojo’s estimate. It has so far raised $173,000, including donations from its neighbor, Google. This is as clean an example as you can get of regulations blocking innovation; a $250k fee just to get started, from the building that gave rise to Pinterest and Pebble. Compare and contrast to pg on "The Power of the Marginal": That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means there's lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There's a sharper line between outside and inside, and only projects that are officially sanctioned—by organizations, or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself—get proper indoor space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can't just tinker. You have to justify. In my opinion, in addition to donating, you should exercise your rights as a citizen and give these officials a piece of the public's mind. Their emails are below. It is very unusual for local officials like Ellis Berns and Anthony Ghiossi to actually have their bad decisions checked by bad publicity, but it's absolutely necessary in this case. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html [2] anthony.ghiossi@mountainview.gov [3] ellis.berns@mountainview.gov

varelse 14y ago
What I'm not seeing in these articles about this place is any sense of responsibility by Hacker Dojo's owners for not doing the due diligence to know what they were getting into in the first place. I don't consider well-intentioned cluelessness a barrier to innovation but your mileage may vary. Ellis Berns doesn't sound like a villain to me but rather just a guy in a tough situation. If the town of Mountain View doesn't enforce their codes here, and if something like the fire in the video posted here were to occur, they'd get their keesters sued out of their pants and rightly so. That said, it's not even a drop in the bucket of Silicon Valley's vast wealth to fix this so if it's worth saving, I suspect it will be saved.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

teffen 14y ago

Typical big government telling people how to live their lives. > No sprinklers. > No handicap access. On second thought...

lambdasquirrel 14y ago
Have you been to the dojo? Most of the life happens on the first floor. Also, most of the parties happen where there's a giant garage door. It's not like the second floor is lacking in ways down and out of the building. It's also a converted warehouse, not much to light up. Would sprinklers be nice? Sure. But the place is not exactly a disaster waiting to happen.

volaski 14y ago

I first hated this sensationalist headline, but on second thought think it's the best title ever. It achieved what it's supposed to do--get attention.

neurotech1 14y ago

Sensational headlines make it sound like they are the silicon valley mafia or something. I have never seen a more BS article in NY times. Hacker Dojo is one of the most respected hacker spaces on the planet. They try and do things as legally and 'up to code' as they can with the resources they have.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago

I think this just bureaucracy run amok. It's something from an 80s movie. Regulations have their place and I don't want to get into any discussion about "big government" but I think this is a bit too far for something that has become such a community icon. Also, I find it odd if they are already at $173K, I would think there would be several alums or those sympathetic that could shell out a measly $80K, that's a rounding error for many successful programmers in SV. Also, I agree with others that the headline was ridiculous. By this standard, many people's middle class homes are "illegal" for one reason or another. However, one positive of the sensationalist headline is it might make people pay more attention and possibly donate.

rprasad 14y ago
Or, you know, they could have just made sure the building was up to code first, like every other business, organization, and individual. Being a startup does not give them carte blanche to ignore basic laws of society, especially not laws which address actual safety concerns. [Of relevance to Hacker Dojo: see pretty much every mass casualty club/nightclub tragedy of the past decade, in which dozens died in each instance due to code violations.] More importantly: if someone had gotten hurt or died in Hacker Dojo as a result of a code violation, all of their officers would be facing criminal negligence charges.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  It's hard to argue that point. I'm under the assumption that they didn't know what it would turn into when they started. They definitely were taking on certain liability.
- bluehat 14y ago
  We had an old permit which did not require these things, only a fire alarm system (which costs $35K and we had installed).

rdl 14y ago

In the case of Hacker Dojo, it has big warehouse-style roll-up doors. If the issue were fire safety and egress, an interim policy of only allowing events >49 people when the roller doors are raised seems reasonable. $250k isn't a huge amount of money, so I don't think there's a huge risk of them getting shut down. Especially given that the space itself is inherently handicap accessible, I don't think ADA bathrooms should be a pressing requirement. Yes, they should have them, but it's not sufficient to deter handicapped people from attending, and it doesn't hurt the value of the space to the majority of non-handicapped attendees.

T_S_ 14y ago

Nice article by NYTimes. Too bad about the linkbait headline, but, hey, they have to sell clicks too. At Hacker Dojo, we're working hard to raise the money so everyone can just get back to writing code, safely egressing etc.

nateabele 14y ago

This is rent-seeking, plain and simple. As municipalities slide ever closer toward insolvency, expect to see these spurious regulations enforced and enacted, ostensibly fronted by bleeding-heart do-gooders, but with the express intent to extort as much money as possible from productive individuals.

objclxt 14y ago
This whole thread just saddens me. I suspect very few people here are qualified to talk about this. It is not "rent-seeking, plain and simple". I speak from experience, as I've carried out many risk assessments against buildings for live events. Fire and building codes exist for a very specific reason: to save lives and prevent injury. If you think being forced to install sprinklers is somehow 'rent-seeking' perhaps you should remember that the Rhode Island Station nightclub fire (in which 100 people died) could have had significantly less impact had sprinklers been installed (as the building code specified). There are too many examples to count of fires where lives have been lost as a result of inadequate prevention and control systems. You may not like the fact that these systems cost money to install and maintain. You may not also like the fact that in most states that vast majority of commercial buildings require them. But they are very much not 'spurious' regulations.
lilsunnybee 14y ago
Yeah no. Rent-seeking would be asking $250,000 just for the permit to run their hacker-space. The city is only requiring that their public space be safe and accessible, not telling them the contractors they should hire and where they are required to spend their money. Heck if the dojo members were dedicated and diligent enough they could do most of the work themselves, probably for a lot less than the estimates they've received. Frankly i don't see where any of this outrage is coming from. They've already raised most of what they need from private donations. It seems unlikely they will actually be shut down. If they were somehow unable to raise the few tens of thousands more they needed to get up to code, it would be due to the greed and stinginess of the well-off so-called pro-business types in the bay area. If tech investors cared a fraction as much about promoting startups and the economy as a whole as getting equity and a solid return on their investment, fund-raising for this sort of thing would be ridiculously easy. Alas most all wealthy individuals are stingy as hell; they might give you $100 if you kiss their feet and carve their name in stone. Otherwise go back to your ghetto and quit bothering them.

adastra 14y ago

When I saw the headline I thought data haven. Hilariously over-hyped headline. What is the NY Times coming to these days?

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

<rant>So the guys in the dojo could build their own airplane, go out in the desert, and fly it and kill themselves. The world is happy with them. They could learn to SCUBA dive. Heli-ski. Become a wild animal tamer. But they can't sit around in the evenings and create things that change the world in a particular building because it doesn't meet code and therefor might be dangerous. Better than that, they could use the facilities even in a state of disrepair, and they did for a long time. It's only now that it has been inspected that suddenly it becomes dangerous. I think the city has an obligation here to prevent people from getting hurt -- unknowingly. You shouldn't walk into an unsafe building without knowing it. But once you put a big red sign up on the door, as long as there is no danger to surrounding buildings or people, leave the guys alone. To top it off, we have this quote: "We try to be as supportive as we can...Businesses spin out of there. We are not at all interested in them closing down" Bullshit. This is the classic Nuremberg defense: we're only following the system. Politicians are voted into office to make decisions, and they could have a wavier created in an hour if the right strings were pulled. This is just a matter of hackers not having a strong local political voice. (I do not like the system being broken in a way such that squeaky activists get special treatment, but it is what it is) Hell, the city should be paying itself for the building to be brought up to code. There shouldn't even be a question about it being a problem for the coders to solve on their own. What the hell kind of priorities do they have out there? They have a place successfully spinning off startups and they're fucking around with it? Other cities would kill for something like that. I just find it amazing that the parks and streets in the Bay Area are full of people living a catch-as-catch-can existence. There's rampant drug use, violent crimes, and so on. Perhaps if we were concentrating on public safety and helping the most number of people, instead of working in silos, we would be doing other, more important things?</rant>

imgabe 14y ago

I'm assuming Hacker Dojo does not actually own the building and is leasing the space. Why isn't the building owner being held at least partially accountable for bringing the space up to code? I'm guessing it wasn't detailed in their lease, but how long is the lease for? Is there a possibility of breaking it and finding a building that does meet the requirements for how they want to use it? Also, in most jurisdictions I've worked in, requirements to bring bathrooms up to ADA are not triggered unless you're already doing renovations over a certain amount in the building. Maybe here it's because the use type of the space is changing, though.

bluehat 14y ago
They busted us less than a week after signing a 3 year lease. In California, there are no protections when you do a commercial lease to make sure the space is legal for you to use. The tenant is responsible for making the space usable.

xfhai 14y ago

It was a glass factory, so why not ask permission to exist as a factory. Maybe there would be lesser requirements. Hackerspace is not really an office.

bluehat 14y ago
The concern is that we teach classes, which people don't do in a glass factory.