VHS has a rule about people sleeping at the space, lets talk about why that is the case. Personally I think it is because it is unhygienic (we don’t have cleaners) and because sleeping somewhere creates a sense of ownership of space that everyone should feel like they can use.
Has someone been sleeping at the new space?
Taking this only as a discussion, point.
I know people have closed their eyes and rested on the couches. Because I
know I have. But that is vastly different from sleeping / camping.
I know if you stay after 1:00 am it is difficult to get get transit until
6:00 am weekdays and 8:00 am on Sunday. It is best to plan to your way home
before, if you are not going to be sufficiently caffeinated to work the
night through.
We do NOT want people camping at the space and making our space their home.
History
VHS founders were part of the Occupy, and other political movements in vancouver. They also helped with soup kitchens, shelters, and other community social projects. They had experience with the arts, burner communities, and other NGOs/Non profits. All of these groups have high homeless. They had experience with the problem of people having no where to go, good people having no where to live or even store their belongings, people that just needed a few days to get back on their feet, Heart breaking tale of woe.
VHS was not built to be a shelter, or a place to help people with housing or food. There are other organizations that are set up and better suited for that purpose. There was a concern that it was be extremely hard to turn these people away, these good people, people from the hackspace community that everyone knew.
So the rule was created to help offset the responsibility of telling a good person that they could not sleep at the space. “I’m sorry you can’t sleep here or store your stuff here, its not my rule it the spaces rule”. We have had a few people ask about sleeping or storing their belongings at the old 45 west (downstairs) but instead of letting them stay a the space we took them home to our own homes. We were a much tighter knit community back then.
Then the Occupy movement happened, and Noise bridge (San Francisco hackspace) became overrun with homeless, VHS became a staging house for “certain” things with the occupy movement. As we started to host more political talks, people started mentioning in the tour of the space that, “no sleeping at the space” is one of our only rules. It was a “feature” that it was one of our only real rules. As new people joined VHS they also repeated the same rule to other people as they gave tours and it become ingrained in our culture.
We are lucky that we have that rule. Noise bridge suffered greatly from their homeless problem and they are finally resolving.
Tl;Dr: The rule was put into place to make it easier to tell people that they couldn’t sleep at VHS without being confrontational, not because of any problem we experienced.
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Agreed.
But to all those people who enjoy drinking at the space, please be responsible and don’t drink and drive. If I am not mistaken I think we’d all prefer if you took a snooze for a few hours than drive home drunk. Just please try not to make a habit of it.
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Tom, I don’t want to grey these lines at all really. Drinking and driving is evil but it is caused by bad planning, I’d prefer people didn’t see vhs as being an option in their plan for the night.
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I’ll take that into consideration.
As with all things that are against the lease, even doing something “just this once” is enough to get us evicted. We don’t want to go through that again.
If having a nap to sleep off the alcohol is part of the plan, perhaps a better plan would be to set aside some cab money. Or Uber, if that’s your thing.
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#YOLO
Perhaps a better plan would be to set aside the drink and simply enjoy the evening with a sub-illegal ‘buzz’.
While I personally don’t like the idea of drinking while I work beyond a beer or two, there is nothing illegal about getting drunk…
Maybe we could keep a few quilts rolled up somewhere so that if someone needs to sleep, they can borrow the quilts, snooze in their car, then drive safely later.
If alcohol consumption is significant enough that VHS crashing is a repeat thing for some people, then maybe the people involved need real help. That’s not intended as an insult. I would rather see someone helped with a problem, than to see VHS ignore the signs out of social comfort (not wanting to offend the person) then read a member’s memorial statement in the newspaper obituaries column…
I don’t know when, or who, but all I am saying is that we should care enough to watch for a problem pattern to prevent tragedy…
1 year later
Nah
It’s not
I was pretty glad to see this thread die.
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