Hackers,
Firstly, I want to express my deepest thanks to everyone who put an effort into trying to make our new hackerspace happen.
That said, I am sad to say that I have bad news. TheTransistor is going to have to keep it’s door closed for another year or two.
The main space we had arranged fell through. We came close to raising the amount needed and several people stepped up (THANK YOU!), but the landlords (a very old couple) just didn’t want “hackers with soldering irons” as tenants. They had given us a counter offer last year, which we raised our offer to meet, but they had just decided that we weren’t fit for their space.
At this point (about a week ago) we started frantically looking for a new space that would work and also meet our financial goals. We looked at a lot of places, but most didn’t fit our needs or were too expensive.
Today, we revisited a building that had three possible suites in it that were for lease. We were told that all three were available. We picked out two options (as the third didn’t have 24×7 access, which was a must). We were told we would be able to move into one of them for sure (both have been vacant for over two years), and that we could move in by July 1st.
Then, literally AS I was writing the email to inform everyone of the good news, we heard back from the Realtor. BOTH spaces were leased out in the last few weeks, and the owner hadn’t notified the Realtor.
At this point, we’re taking it as a sign that this isn’t going to work out this year. The timing is really bad as the core group has several security-related conventions and other commitments we need to attend to in the next month or two. After that the holidays hit. We are afraid we will need to wait until at least February to give this another attempt.
All commitments / prepayments will be refunded tonight. If you would like to stay informed on future going-ons (we do plan on doing some meetings / LAN parties between now and whenever we finally get another space), please sign up for our (newly public) mailing list: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/thetransistor
Thanks again to everyone that has put effort into this. We hope to see you around,
d3c4f
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