Zocalo Coffeehouse

I'm Tim Holmes. We're here in San Leandro, California, and I own Zocalo Coffee House along with my wife, Mitch. We do our in-house roasting here as well as have a large community space, and we've been here for about 11 years now. Went month-to-month, or at least was up about a year ago. We started negotiating a little bit before that, so we've been month-to-month since February. Our rent increased substantially, and were no longer able to do a sublet, and so it became unaffordable for us to be able to run Zocalo here in this space. Right now we are in our last two weeks of being in this space. Our last day in here is the 22nd of September. It's now the 10th, so 12 days. We're having a fairly big party that night from 7pm to the last day. We're open at 7pm on. Then we'll close that next day and not be open again in this location. We'll clear out this space the last week of the month or so, and we'll be out of here by the end of September. Well, we're selling the business itself to Sarah, and she's taking over all Zocalo. That's all the equipment, the brand, the online presence, our Yelp site, the website, everything, and everything in here. And she's looking for a space right now. She hasn't got something nailed down yet, or at least she's not willing to say she has. I don't know the details, but I don'think she's got something nailed down right now, but she's working on that now. Well, San Leandro's been great. We serve a very broad area. We pull in people from Castor Valley, Hayward, San Francisco, north into Richmond, and down, and a lot of open as well. But San Leandro's been fantastic. The people who walk here, the people who are on a regular basis, are very good friends. I've met most of my best friends through here, and most people I know in San Leandro through here, of course, for 11 years. And our kids. My kids grew up here as well. We didn't have kids when we took over the space. We built a big kid space for the area, and made sure that were as welcoming to the parents of young children as we could be. Because my goal was to build a community space that built activism and got people involved in the city, and got them involved in how the city ran. I met it initially as a community space, and that was really what became the space. My goal was to get other people to be the activists. My goal was to get people to use this as a launch point, as a kicking off point for everything. And I've seen a lot of that happen. If you look back through history, you'll see a whole series of historic events that are triggered by coffee houses. They're triggered by people who get together and talk agitatedly sometimes about things they don't But they're propelled forward, partly by caffeine, and partly by the third place. The ability to be a peer to everyone else in the space, to be able to freely vent your ideas and have them be vetted just by peers, not by people who are judging you, not by someone behind a dais up on a city council, behind a desk, or someone behind a city staff desk. So it's just a lot more freedom of expression, a lot more ability to communicate in places And that was sort of very much the initial and always the impetus to create in the first place. I really wanted to build a place that didn't necessarily bring about revolution, but certainly kept people on their toes. Thank you.