Silicon Valley Techies Fight to Save a Popular but Illegal Haven

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/technology/techies-fight-to-save-hacker-dojo-a-popular-silicon-valley-work-space.html?_r=1

by bluehat • 14 years ago

92 104 14 years ago

nytimes.com

lhnn• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

araneae• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4xaWMKBlw4#t=25s

DannyBee• 14 years 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).

rprasad7• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

The Great Fire of London agrees with you.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

It says right in the article what made it illegal. Take some goddamn time to read if you're that interested.

ekianjo5• 14 years 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 :)

johnpmayer• 14 years ago

Ugh:

"What it does not have, according to city officials, are things that would make it an office. It doesn’t have enough fire exits, sprinklers or wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, as required by city regulations."

rprasad7• 14 years ago

Not being up to code makes it illegal to occupy the building. I'm not quite sure why the NY Times would leave something like that out; it's possible that code violations are more prevalent in NY and thus the import need not be explained.

flipp• 14 years ago

More people will read it because of the headline. How is that bad?

evmar• 14 years ago

It's funny to contrast to Noisebridge, which seems to me must surely be illegal by all sorts of codes. I wonder if the equivalent authorities in SF just have more important things to worry about.

neurotech13• 14 years ago

Ironically, at Noisebridge they are wheelchair accessible and have sprinklers in the ceiling. The wheelchair/scooter users visit regularly. I'm 99% sure the sprinklers were already installed when they moved in. A lot of build-out work was done when moving to the current location.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

Which, unfortunately, you cannot sign a waiver that says I won't hold anyone responsible for me burning up in a fire here.

What about the buildings, cars, etc nearby? Fire spreads, and from what I see on Maps the Dojo isn't exactly isolated.

ramanujan6• 14 years ago

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

varelse2• 14 years 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.

ramanujan6• 14 years ago

All regulation from the TSA to the local building officials is optimized to sound like a good idea. Who could be against health or safety? And that then becomes the thin end of the wedge, as the requirements and fees spiral from there.

1. Sprinklers and fire exits? Arguably necessary.

2. ADA compliant bathrooms and wheelchair ramps? Not part of a reasonable MVP[1]. What if every website "had to" be readable in Braille and multiple tongues on day one, before one had the revenue to pay for that sort of thing?

3. As for "building permits", they are just a tax by the local government[2], like red light cameras:

  In his opposition, Inks said the permit would 
  "incentivize" code enforcement officers to go out and find 
  major violations to bring in revenue. He added that city 
  officials already get paid a salary. 

  "To be clear ... this is about raising money," he said, 
  adding that similar permits and fees in other cities have 
  led to "further noncompliance" and the "collapse" of code 
  enforcement efforts, which led to the necessity of giving 
  property owners an "amnesty" period.

  Inks pointed out that small businesses were already being 
  hit with fines for "petty" violations, such as a $500 fine 
  on the Milk Pail Market for selling pumpkins in the   
  parking lot.

In other words: give these guys an inch and they'll take a mile, asserting their author-it-ay the whole way. It always starts with something reasonable sounding (fire codes) and then moves to incentivizing the government for uncovering more violations and more fines. And it's very hard to figure out all the violations ahead of time [3]:

  As we wrote earlier, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) 
  is continuing its program of in-depth investigations of 
  hotels to determine whether they comply with the Americans 
  with Disabilities Act or ADA. The investigations are 
  called "sweeps" because they target all hotels in a given 
  geographic area. There is also some basis to believe that 
  the sweeps may now also focus on certain industries such 
  as hotels, restaurants and other places of public 
  accommodation.

  ...

  In my experience, even the best design professionals   
  typically have an inadequate knowledge of all of the 
  accessibility standards. And local building official 
  approvals provide no protection against accessibility 
  violations.

Like all regulation, the ADA stuff is optimized to sound like a good idea. Who could be against providing access for the disabled? Then you realize the Department of Justice is spending scarce resources conducting sweeps on business owners, and that the total cost for a large ADA upgrade can easily be millions of dollars per facility. Just one example [4]:

  Owners and managers of swimming pools at hotels, city 
  recreation centers and public parks are scrambling to 
  install mechanical chair lifts to comply with new federal 
  requirements that all public pools be accessible to 
  disabled swimmers.

  Some hotels fear the cost of the equipment or fines for 
  noncompliance could put them out of busines

  The law doesn’t affect private clubs or pools owned by 
  neighborhood associations that aren’t open to the public.
  It’s a massive and expensive undertaking. The Association 
  of Pool and Spa Professionals says its research shows that 
  between 235,000 and 310,000 pools require the upgrade. 
  Manufacturers estimate the lifts run $3,500 to $6,500, and 
  installation can double those costs. Altogether, owners 
  could face combined costs exceeding $1 billion.

A billion here, a billion there...soon you're talking real money. Anyway, this sort of thing is a big part of the reason that Bay Area housing prices are so high. And it all starts with taking regulators at their word that they are out to protect your health and safety.

POSTSCRIPT: There's at least one obvious alternative to rule by unelected regulators. We already have reviews of everything else under the sun on Google, Amazon, Yelp, Zagat, Consumer Reports, and the like. Some of these reviewers we trust with life and death decisions, like Consumer Reports' car safety ratings. So just do the same for those codes that are truly crucial (e.g. fire codes), by allowing different certification authorities to compete. Maybe you start by expanding the domain of the Palo Alto and Mountain View fire departments such that they overlap, and a certification from either is sufficient to do business such that you get some competition into the mix. With just a little bit of choice, you'll suddenly see much more reasonable and cost-conscious behavior from regulators.

  [1] I know it's "the law". But there are unjust laws.
  [2] http://www.mv-voice.com/news/show_story.php?id=2260
  [3] http://hotellaw.jmbm.com/2010/06/ada_defense_lawyer_implications.html
  [4] http://www.heraldnews.com/news/x596769962/New-ADA-access-rules-may-scuttle-swimming-at-some-hotels

kragen4• 14 years ago

A small but crucial point: Hacker Dojo doesn't have owners; it has members.

anamax• 14 years ago

> 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.

No, MV wouldn't get sued. Or rather, if someone did sue, said someone would be at risk for sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit.

US govts have no obligation to enforce their laws. They certainly have no liability for failure to do so.

tzs• 14 years ago

Can you actually make a case for your claim that the officials made bad decisions? Nothing in what you wrote explains why Hacker Dojo should be able to operate in violation of fire and safety codes that others are subject to.

sabat• 14 years ago

It is indeed bullshit, particularly because there is no defensible, practical reason for that kind of regulation. This is little more than "you wanna do business? grease my fuckin' palm" on the part of city government.

teffen• 14 years ago

Typical big government telling people how to live their lives.

> No sprinklers.

> No handicap access.

On second thought...

lambdasquirrel• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

neurotech13• 14 years 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.

dinkumthinkum4• 14 years 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.

rprasad7• 14 years 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.

dinkumthinkum4• 14 years 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.

bluehat4• 14 years ago

We had an old permit which did not require these things, only a fire alarm system (which costs $35K and we had installed).

rdl2• 14 years 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_• 14 years 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.

nateabele5• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

bluehat4• 14 years ago

A significant chunk of the $250K does go into permits. Also, we have done all of the work ourselves that we are legally permitted to, the remaining work has to be done by a licensed contractor (by law).

adastra• 14 years ago

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

DanielBMarkham• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

bluehat4• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

bluehat4• 14 years ago

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

Silicon Valley Techies Fight to Save a Popular but Illegal Haven

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