Permit Me to Create

In which your landlord needs to know about your side hustle

The Janky Time Machine’s electro-coupler decided it was tired of linear causality and dropped me somewhere in the near-ish future where apartment lobbies smell like disinfectant and broken dreams. So, basically unchanged. Though the disinfectant might be sentient now, hard to say.

Found this gem taped to the glass door of a mid-rise that could be in any city, except the laundry room has a biometric scanner and someone’s sharpied a tiny message of defiance onto the notice.

Here’s what nobody warned us about: the gig economy didn’t just come for our jobs, it came for our hobbies too. And then the bureaucracy came for both. Building Code 2036-CC treats your podcast the same way it treats someone running a machine shop out of their kitchen—as something that requires permits, fees, and “noise ordinances during ideation hours.”

Ideation hours. Let that sink in. Thinking too loud between 7am and 10pm is now a lease violation.

The $45/month is the perfect price point, isn’t it? Cheap enough that most people will just pay it rather than argue. Expensive enough that it adds up. And if you’ve got a Premium tier lease, which presumably costs several hundred more per month, your creative permit is “included.” Like parking, or access to the gym you’ll never use.

The co-working space on the third floor is the tell, though. “Commercial creative output” gets its own designated area, separated from residential creative output, which I guess is what you call making a podcast at 9pm on a Tuesday because you have something to say and the internet exists. Management has decided they need to know the difference. Management has decided there is a difference.

And that liability clause? “Management not liable for undisclosed algorithm usage.” Your landlord isn’t just tracking whether you’re creating; they’re tracking how you’re creating. Whether you’ve got AI in the loop. Whether you disclosed it properly. Section 12(d) of your lease agreement has opinions about your creative process.

The Janky Time Machine is making a noise that suggests we should leave before something important falls off, but I’m still thinking about that scribble.

Wonder if they finished the episode.