(2011-02-12) Citizen Space Coworking Shutting Down

Tara Hunt notes: When we opened CS, there were some other coworking-ish spaces in town: artist spaces, writers spaces and, of course Teh Hat Factory (which we opened with several others in spring 2006). But there weren’t any CoWorking spaces. Today I think there are something like 7 or 8 of them. And they are doing a damned fine job of moving the movement forward and serving the needs of the community. Which is why when we were told by April (Citizen Space General Manager) that the space was declining in membership and, well, it wasn’t really the community hub it used to be, I sat back and pondered the future of Citizen Space... So…the time has come for Citizen Space to move on. We’ve put a call out to see if anyone wants to take it over or otherwise put the time into it that we no longer can (I’m in Montreal, Hillary has a baby and a house outside of SF and Chris is at Google), but really, I’m more than okay with letting it go. It’s done its job. She’s created her legacy. She also notes in the comments: I put in well over $30,000 of my own money over the years (that I could totally use now!).

So, is it that

• San Francisco can't support that many CoWorking spaces
• Citizen Space wasn't competing well, once the founders left
• it was in a bad location, so the new competitors were more convenient
• CoWorking doesn't have a sustainable model yet, and so all spaces will have a finite Life Cycle as unsuspecting founders burn out?
• other?