A clarification regarding Lupin’s response to a San Jose Inside article

And here I thought the reporter, Jennifer Wadsworth, had been entirely too generous with the Glyn and Lori Kay Stout, co-owners of Lupin Lodge. Her article[1] includes the substance of Lupin Lodge’s defense stated below:

An overly ambitious reporter wrote a piece about Lupin in a local give away entertainment weekly. The article is inaccurate in many respects including the headline. It drifts back and forth between historical facts and one-sided accounts taken from interviews of a limited number of disgruntled former resident members who had been evicted over a period of many years. The article fails to mention that in every eviction case, Lupin prevailed on the facts. In most cases, the people involved were accepted and given opportunities to live and work in a peaceful setting but later failed to live up to financial commitments or standards of conduct. So management took the legal steps necessary to remove these people from just squatting on the property, not paying rent and thinking they should be cared for by others. Like all employers and people who hire the services of others, Lupin gets its share of hires that don’t measure up to minimum standards.[2]

The article also quotes me from my blog posting reacting to a fatal collision between a motorcycle rider and a Lupin resident who had apparently been the office manager.[3] So in the context of the above, I need to offer a clarification: I was not evicted. I left.

I left in December 2008 not only because I was distressed by Lupin’s treatment of workers and not only because I was disturbed by noisy neighbors,[4] but because, at that time, as the financial crisis was hitting, gasoline prices were skyrocketing. Even though it all came to relatively cheap rent, I was no longer able to afford the combination of resident membership, trailer rental, and gasoline for the commute to California State University, East Bay, in Hayward. The decision to leave was a decision I had already made, having acquired property in Lake County,[5] property I reluctantly gave up as my finances continued to deteriorate. I was two months behind on the rent and resident membership to Lupin when I left and the numbers were simply not coming out. My mother offered me a room and I jumped on it.

From what I have heard since—and not just from Wadsworth, but also from other resident members—Lupin continued to deteriorate after I left. Wadsworth interviewed me at length for her article. Frankly, Wadsworth had already heard worse from others and I probably learned more from my conversation with her than she learned from me, but in my view, based on my experience at Lupin, her article is plausible and likely to be accurate.

  1. [1]Jennifer Wadsworth, “Bad Nudes Bared: Lupin Lodge’s Idyllic Clothing-Free Lifestyle Unravels in Alarming Fashion,” San Jose Inside, July 9, 2015, http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2015/07/09/bad-nudes-bared-lupin-lodges-idyllic-clothing-free-lifestyle-unravels-in-alarming-fashion/
  2. [2]Glyn Stout and Lori Kay Stout, “Metro Poster 1,” distributed by third party email, available at https://parts-unknown.org/drupal7/sites/default/files/2015-07-10/Metro Poster 1.pdf
  3. [3]David Benfell, “Killing people,” Not Housebroken, December 15, 2010, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=6006
  4. [4]David Benfell, “Killing people,” Not Housebroken, December 15, 2010, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=6006
  5. [5]David Benfell, “Buying land,” Not Housebroken, June 21, 2008, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=619

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