I often wish local councils would fund places where you could just go to to hang around.When I lived in Seattle, the State of Washington had a set up for just this sort of thing at the convention center.
If you needed someplace to go and bang on your laptop, it offered free space with free electricity and WiFi. Instead of being a formal co-working space, it was just large chairs with built-in desks, like we used to have in elementary school. Except that they were comfortable, wired with electrical outlets, and scattered around a nice hallway with good views of the city.
Very inviting, but almost nobody used them in part because they weren't promoted — you just had to stumble upon them. And also because at the time, they weren't necessary. Finding tech office space was as easy as striking up a conversation in a coffee shop. I landed a squishy office on the 30th floor of a downtown skyscraper with views of Puget Sound for free just because the startup guy I bumped into at Tully's liked the sound of what I was working on.
Alas, with the arrival of VC money into the tech sphere, the days of bootstrapped cooperative entrepreneurship appear to be gone. I wish someone would write a book about that era of tech. It was really something.