Up here in Portland (well really the western suburbs) we had a rather ambitious TechShop start up about a decade and a half ago, but they didn't last a year. I made a decent sized donation at the start because I liked what they were doing, and took some great classes there on woodworking and CNC. The woodworking instructor in particular was really interesting as he was an old school pattern maker (patterns for casting) which involves different techniques than finish or furniture carpentry. He could build to 1/64" tolerances by using various combinations of sanders, including a stationary disc sander with a 1 yard diameter. That thing was a pretty cool piece of equipment.
Unfortunately I'm sad to say besides the finances they had some cultural issues. A few of the instructors went pretty heavy on the "boys club" style humor in a way that would clearly alienate a lot of women.
At first, you have an influx of excited members, so it feels like you have a shot at it - but within a couple of years, most of them drop out. They either get discouraged, or they find their groove and really want the convenience and flexibility of working on their own schedule with their own tools that aren't abused by strangers.
If you want to run a Makerspace in Portland, Seattle, or in the SF Bay Area, you better have an endowment from a wealthy donor, a long-term government grant, or something of that sort.
Of course, that market has other problems - cost and neighbors who don't want 24/7 power tool use - but it's better than the alternative where anyone serious about their hobby can easily build their own shop.
Things like milling machines are expensive, and spend 99%+ of hours unused in home shops.
On the flipside, accountability and safety are expensive in shared spaces.
The best version of this that I've usually seen is where 10 people who want to work on cars rent a shared space and provide shared tooling.
It would be neat to see votech programs/community colleges fulfill some of this role, particularly as a "meeting space for makers."
I find it heartbreaking but it seems inevitable. Not a lot of people want to keep an old building available for rent when they can sell the property for redevelopment into "luxury" apartments or condos.
I totally understand though. People don't realize how expensive precision metalworking stuff is. And that's before you start to insure the place.
For something like a really rigid CNC (not a desktop sized one or for wood), someone needs to come up with a reasonable cost machine that can hold thous and has a spindle that isn't stupidly overpriced.
A while back I looked into building my own, and ended up with a Tormach because I couldn't compete on price. There are a couple near that price point now, but going transformatively cheaper seems very hard.
Lathes are easier. The C4 class is both quite cheap and impressively capable (much more than the cheaper C3 mini lathe class).
But as others noted, it is not an attractive business. High fixed costs, you're significantly more optional than gym subscriptions to many people, and your best customers naturally tend to graduate to owning their own.
And then there was American Steel…
You’re not imagining things. It’s hard to sustain places like this when private equity firms are buying up all the land to build high end apartments.
It sounds like there were some differences in the membership structure, but American Steel was bought by a private equity firm, the existing tenants were kicked out, and now as you say the new VC funded firms bring in far more income than poor artists ever could. That sounds like exactly the kind of loss to our community that we suffered when Techshop went under.
I was being nitpicky that AmSteel got biotech put in place rather than housing, not that it didn't get gentrified.
I’ve done a lot of metal working. It’s a messy process using cutting oils etc. But once you’ve cut and shaped the metal as desired you wash it with soap and water in the sink before assembly.
Similar competitions (solar car, concrete canoe, pinewood derby, hackathons, yearly DEFCON attendance, 4-H robotics, Zero robotics, INTEL/GOOGLE/Microsoft/ThermoFischer science fairs, math olympiads, science olympiads) might be reasonable draws for other maker shops.