[Noisebridge-discuss] Sleeping at NB

Gian Pablo Villamil gian.pablo at gmail.com
Sat Dec 25 05:55:54 UTC 2010


Dr. Jesus looked into this a while ago, and posted to the list. In a
nutshell, living at NB is not against our lease, it is a planning code
violation. Our space is not zoned residential. However, the inspectors
who show up every month to look at the elevator probably don't care,
as long as there are no obvious signs of long term residential use.

I have quoted his message below:

==============================================

I want to clear up a few facts here to help enlighten the brewing
discussion a bit:

First of all, it's not against our lease as far as I can tell.  It is
a planning code violation.  Every time I've talked to city planning,
including today, they've been real clear that 2169's current status is
that there shall be no residential uses, period.

Second, it's a legal gray area as to whether taking a nap while
waiting for the next BART train is "residential use" or not.  There's
some precedent for it: I know other people in our zoning category and
neighborhood commercial district who do it occasionally.  Staying
overnight might be ok, extended periods are definitely not ok, but
there aren't any serious consequences if the planning department
doesn't know it's happening.  You can look at the zoning page on the
wiki for links to more detail.

Third, a Department of Building Inspection person shows up once a
month to check on the elevators, and the easiest way I can think of to
get into the elevator room involves going through our space.  I have
no idea whether they're going to report someone passed out on a couch
in front of the member shelves.  My intuition says they're probably
going to ignore it, but on the other hand the city is kind of broke.

Fourth, I talked to three of the people involved with the last spat.
I found out that a main reason why they are occasionally at
Noisebridge overnight is that although they have housing, it's usually
small and they prefer the Noisebridge social environment to being
alone.  Passing out sometimes seems to be a common side effect of
this, and for some of them it develops into a sheepishly admitted
habit.  I've seen all three people pushing brooms at least once.  I've
also seen at least one of them have a friend show up high on acid and
pass out on one of the couches.

Lastly, a common compliant seems to be the cost of transportation
elsewhere, and the difficulty of getting affordable housing in San
Francisco.  I added a starving hacker resources page on the wiki to
aggregate the suggestions I'm sure will come up in the ensuing thread:

 https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Starving_hackers

Please contribute to it for future generations who won't see this thread.

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Ronald Cotoni <setient at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok so.  I am usually pretty quiet on this list.  I am not a member but I am
> going to quote my last talk at 5 minutes of fame concerning public transit
> which also seems very applicable here.  For being a city of such smart
> people, you are all fucking retarded.  There is only one way to solve this.
>  We need to find out if it is indeed against our lease.  It doesn't matter
> if the same people are doing it or if it is different people every single
> night of the week.  If we are not supposed to have people "living" here
> which could be someone (count 1) person, even if different every night,
> could make us get kicked the f out of 2169 mission, we are being selfish and
> mentally handicapped.  If it is against the rules (not even set by the
> almighty noisebridge or even involving consensus) we HAVE to enforce it.  I
> personally am going to take a few minutes to review the lease if I can find
> a copy or speak to someone who you know, actually knows.  Personally, if I
> find out in my research that we are not supposed to, the path is very clear.
>  No one does it.  I would hope someone would actually have some balls to
> either say STOP or something else such as calling the landlord and putting
> complaints in.  No offense, if noisebridge cannot pull it's own head out of
> it's own rectum, you might need some type of outside intervention to put
> things into check.   Sorry for the doucheyness but this really isn't
> something we should still be talking about.  Keep It Simple Stupid is a good
> idea in this situation.
>
> On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Sai <noisebridge at saizai.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 10:09 AM, Shannon Lee <shannon at scatter.com> wrote:
>> > This is the traffic light problem -- you've got a bunch of people at a
>> > corner waiting to cross.
>>
>> That is an interesting analogy to make. Here is the anarchist (à la
>> Moxie) equivalent in your analogy:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Cassini
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space
>>
>> - Sai
>> _______________________________________________
>> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>
>
>
> --
> Ronald Cotoni
> Systems Engineer
>
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> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>
>



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