I'm always amazed at how Noisebridge seems to survive. It's grimy, chaotic and in an expensive city. But it always survives somehow.
Running a hackerspace for profit is most likely a dead-end.
It might work in the US, where it's possible that donations to charities get huge tax breaks, but I don't think it matters as much in other parts of the world.
One problem with being volunteer-led is that if your core is allowed to weaken, or if there aren't policies in place to "manage" or exclude bad members of the community, one or two bad eggs could be enough to cause people to get tired of their antics and quit (which, as I've read, is a problem that Noisebridge has time and again).
I think this post [1] sums it up quite well:
> Ask anybody who served on the board of our nonprofit hackerspace HeatSync Labs over the past 2 years, and they'll tell you they spent approaching 0% of their time envisioning and executing on what kind of awesome nonprofit we should be and instead spent all of their time babysitting and psychoanalyzing a CONSTANT (albeit minority) population of angry members.
> Why are they so angry at this person, their project, or the way they they were spoken to? Have they tried talking to them? Have they tried not yelling at them? Have they offered to help? Were they broken up with recently? Are they having problems at work?
Volunteer-led ones would work better if more of them had a constantly-renewing team of 2-3 volunteers specifically trained in community management and dispute mediation, but unfortunately most spaces might not have such privilege.
Source: I'm involved in one such struggling non-for-profit hackerspace myself. :)
[1] https://citizengadget.com/toxicity-inclusivity-and-community...