It seems like you’re using “The Vulcan” to sometimes mean “me and my friends” (save the Vulcan!), and sometimes mean “the developer” (the Vulcan was incorrectly given an exemption to rent control).
It has been a little confusing to me.
Sorry that I left that out. Making these pitches is new to us, we aren’t media professionals so we’re learning as we go. It’s hard to write an article that’ll be heard by everyone. I didn’t want to get too into the weeds about the legalese since that can turn some people off.
Thanks!
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Not if you’d read the article and @Xeno 's comments: “We are zoned live/work, have a multi-milllion dollar sprinkler system, fire alarms (with very regular tests) and have regular inspections. The Vulcan (like a lot of East Bay warehouses) has been above board for decades.” link
If there’s an existing framework that supports the position, then I’d have found an argument leading with that to be much more compelling.
Well, if you’d read the article, you’d have noticed it.
I don’t have the least interest in what these people do for a living, or how much cultural value they’re adding to the community.
Yes, that’s obvious.
Ultimately, when I say “The Vulcan” it means the physical building. Since the laws apply to buildings, when I say “The Vulcan was given an exemption” it still actually means the building, because if it’s sold to another developer, the exemption stays with the building. Since a new developer may well decide to level the place and build condos, “Save The Vulcan” still makes sense (in my mind at least), but I can see how it could be confusing. Again, I didn’t want to get too far into the weeds in the original post, happy to go weed whacking in comments though!
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I’m not able to glean anything from that comment about rent control, why it should apply here, but has been withheld unjustly.
I mentioned my confusion only because it undermined your point about the exemption. I’m now clear that the building owner, at some point in the past, successfully argued that rent control should not apply to this building.
You, on the other hand, for not-yet-clearly-articulated reasons (having to do with sprinklers, I guess?) think that rent control should apply.
No need to enumerate your reasons here… For me, “developer pulled dirty trick to skirt laws intended to protect people” is far more persuasive than “think of the circus performers!” 
I accept that other people don’t work like me, might find the emotional appeal more compelling.
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Nope. I didn’t make the contention about rent control because we have sprinklers, M_Dub quoted that in their argument. If you had looked at the context of the quote, I was replying to someone concerned about the Ghost Ship fire and was, rightly, concerned that funding us would just be funding a dangerous living condition.
You’re right about people not all working the same, which is why these public engagements are difficult. If I had made a legalistic plea, someone else might’ve been irked that I hadn’t made an emotional one… you and I might think more similarly than you assume. I think we have a lot of arguments on our side, it’s hard to put them all into a post meant for general consumption though.
Cheers!
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Thank you, Xeno.
I lived in El Cerrito when the Ghost Ship burned and recall it vividly. I’d not heard of the Vulcan until this post and so was worried.
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Thanks for your concern, it was a terrifying night. I was on my home from work when I saw the flames. Ghost ship is only 10 or so blocks from us so I had a few minutes where I thought it might be my home and roommates on fire. There are several other warehouses in the area, a few owned by the same corporation. We generally have tried to stay under the radar, but after months of meetings and coordination, we decided it’d be best to have a more public profile. If we don’t let the bay area at large know what’s going on, no one will ever know. The things we have in these warehouse spaces are pretty awesome and we aren’t all flouting the law and being unsafe. Most of us have seen the demolition of the warehouse community in SF and are trying to avoid a similar devastation on this side of the bay.
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Working class does not mean “my trust find does not stretch to a private jet.”
It is my experience that the sense of entitlement and self-absorption needed to be an artist are vanishingly rarely found in people who did not grow up just being handed stuff. Entitled because you have to believe you can and self-absorbed to believe you should.
I guess the OP felt that “plucky blue collar rebels fight the man” was an easier sell to happy mutants than “slumming one percenters seek to keep their costs low so that they can continue to pursue their dreams.”
If they’re slumming one percenters, they have no need to keep their costs low.
What’s your evidence for this claim?
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“they have no need to keep their costs low”
what? it’s about where you’re from, what you’ve given up.
they could be genuinely starving, that doesn’t change the fact that that starvation is a choice.
and choosing to have nothing is not what those who started out with nothing generally tend to do.
thus my cynicism about the “working class” part.
So you have no evidence, just a stereotype. Got it.
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You’re welcome.
Aaaaand whoosh!
My mom was a hospice nurse and my dad was logger who was laid off by Weyerhaeuser when I was 13, but you don’t seem to be arguing in good faith… you’d rather claim that anyone not making a shit ton of money deserves to be cast aside. A sort of “poverty is a moral failure” argument so common from smug libertarian types. It’s a convenient way to ignore actual problems.
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I’m sorry, but you have entirely misconstrued what I meant to say. My point is solely that the words “working class” in this context were used as shorthand for “worthy,” but it seems unlikely that they genuinely apply to very many of the two hundred in the original article. I don’t believe that poverty is the fault of the poor. I do believe, though, that some rich people choose to be poor, and some even just pretend to be poor, and that the artistic community contains a larger proportion of both those types of people than average.
I apologize for missing your point. The term “working class” was used because that’s what most people living in the Vulcan are. It isn’t used to prove worthiness, the point is that we don’t have trust funds or rich parents to turn to for this process, if we did, we wouldn’t be asking the public for anything. There might be a one percenter slumming around here but I haven’t met them – maybe we’ve been hanging around very different art communities.
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It seems my cynicism was unwarranted, then. Or people are keeping quiet about their backstories. I think I’ll go with I made an assumption based on ignorance and leave it at that. Apologies, again.
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Thanks, I made some assumptions about your comments too, sorry about that.
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Unwarranted snark aside - I like it when arguments and misunderstandings are settled politely.
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