This has been a real problem around me, and it was getting worse before the pandemic. I have barely tried since, but as we are getting back to in-person events it will keep taunting me. I’m in the Boston MA USA area.

We have some spaces, like library rooms. But they often have constraints. One was that you had to be a tax-ID non-profit. It turns out we are for one of the groups I organize, but not all of them. So many of the more informal types are out of luck.

If you did qualify for the library room and get approved, you can’t have food. Or you can–but you have to use the library catering. This was like $200 for a dozen brownies.

And also: if you do make the cut, you cannot use it for regular meetings. So people can’t get used to going to the library on the third Thursday…or whatever.

There was a time when you could get a restaurant room, if you would spend some amount of money. But my groups have been full of people who don’t spend like that, or don’t drink like a sportsball crowd. So they start saying that you can’t take up that space anymore. And I get that–running a restaurant is hard and margins are thin. I don’t blame them. But we also don’t want to force people to buy an $8 beer.

There are some “community rooms” around. It’s very hard to figure out who has them, how to use them, and schedule them. And someone has to show up with the key. This failed for our neighborhood group several times.

I don’t know how to solve this in a place where real estate is high and there just aren’t rooms sitting around. I also think liability and cleaning weigh on this.

I don’t know how to solve this.