It's sad that they couldn't figure out how to make it economically viable as a business, especially after 10 years. IMHO, it's hard to make social entrepreneurship work when there's not a clear priority on creating customer value over social value. Especially around topics which have such high curb appeal (ie democratizing making), yet in actual practice turn into a daily grind of space rentals, equipment rentals and instruction sales.
The perennial problem with relying on charitable grants to make budget is that (usually) such grants eventually dry up. Thus, they should only ever be thought of as a short-term launch boost. Fortunately, unlike ten years ago, there are now quite a few local machine shops and other vendors who will do prototyping and short-run manufacturing using CAD, 3D printers, CNC mills, laser cutters, etc. They aren't as cheap as a grant-subsidized charity but the ones I've used are efficient and focused on getting my small jobs done right.
I’m a member at a local community run (not for profit) hack space, and I have been a member at commercial (for profit) maker spaces. The community run model has a vastly better vibe - better equipment - and is a more open and hackable environment.
In my experience, hack spaces, like most of the best things in life, are better when they’re not a for profit business.
Ten years is actually a pretty good run for a makerspace and I congratulate Hacker Lab for their unusual degree of success.
When I founded ALTSpace, in Seattle, back in 2011, there were at least four other public makerspaces in the city, all of which have since closed. A few more have opened since then; some of them have since gone under. Makerspaces are heavily dependent on the energy and involvement of the community which sustains them. You have to be able to turn over your management every couple of years.
I don't really know why you would try to run a makerspace like a business. They are fundamentally community-oriented resource and activity spaces. It's much easier to make things work in a bottom-up, volunteer-supported, community-focused non-profit style. It keeps your overhead lower and your potential membership larger. You have to think of it as more like a public library than a machine shop.
The utility of a makerspace is strongly related to proximity: the less time it takes to get there, the smaller a job you can reasonably undertake there; the smaller the jobs you feel comfortable doing there, the more often you are likely to show up; the more time you spend there, the better the community works, and the more likely you are to spend time cleaning and maintaining the space.
There is therefore a kind of anti-scaling economics at work. A big, well-funded, well-equipped makerspace has to draw people from a large area to support its running expenses. But if it takes you an hour to get to the makerspace, you're only going to go there when you have multiple hours of work to do. How many times a month do you have a big project needing multiple hours of work? That is a single-digit number and for most people a small one. So you have to cast a wider net to support a larger makerspace, but you also have to charge more, which reduces your potential member base. It is a tricky balance to find, and it's even trickier to find much surplus value that could be extracted as profit.
Places like this should be publicly funded like libraries. They are for the public good and enable people to use their creativity improving public moral and sometimes enabling someone to build something great they could not have at home.
We have publicly paid for workshops here for wood working in many cities and towns. You pay a tiny fee to use the equipment but the rest is paid for by the state. These places are also used to teach "shop" to kids etc. I would love to see the maker spaces get classified as such as well.
The perennial problem with relying on charitable grants to make budget is that (usually) such grants eventually dry up. Thus, they should only ever be thought of as a short-term launch boost. Fortunately, unlike ten years ago, there are now quite a few local machine shops and other vendors who will do prototyping and short-run manufacturing using CAD, 3D printers, CNC mills, laser cutters, etc. They aren't as cheap as a grant-subsidized charity but the ones I've used are efficient and focused on getting my small jobs done right.