I dropped by bzhive.com, a coworking space just north of San Francisco, to check it out. The door was locked, the lights were out, and nobody appeared to be home. I called the phone number listed. A young woman hesitantly answered. After hearing why I called, she said they were about to or just had announced the closing of the space.
My wife and I walked around the neighborhood. My first programming job 37 years ago was just two blocks away. The area was and still is a light industrial park: auto repair shops, a couple of sandwich shops, some glass repair shops, Mighty Leaf Tea company, office spaces, etc. I think it was a good choice of location – minutes off the freeway, places to eat, parking, and almost certainly cheap rent. There were a lot of “for lease signs” around. The landscaping is being kept up. It is a good neighborhood.
We have been looking around, Marin County is both the old money and the not yet affluent. The old Italian construction companies are increasingly staffed by Hispanics. The children of the company founders are off doing something else. We have not seen an entrepreneurial, techie crowd here. No coffee houses full of laptops and budding startups.
There are several places like that in Austin, though they are wearing out their welcome and moving into coworking spaces. Coffeehouse owners are noticing that a business meeting that takes up half their tables for four hours and buys two coffees is not good for their bottom line. The Starbucks on Anderson Lane has pulled their big table out. Kneaded Pleasures on Far West bans laptops during lunchtime. I’ve read interviews with the owners of Progress Cafe in East Austin where they talked about doing the same, or at least turning off the WiFi during lunch.