San Francisco’s in a doom loop of a hellscape and it’s just all bad, right? We think not. But as the NBA gears up to bring their annual All-Star Game to San Francisco’s Chase Center in February, putting the city under a national microscope, city officials are working behind the scenes to convince the haters the water is perfectly fine and perhaps even shed San Francisco’s negative reputation.
“All eyes are going to be on us here and we need to show off really well,” Sarah Dennis Phillips, executive director of the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, told Gazetteer SF.
Chase Center, home to the Golden State Warriors, will host the official All-Star game, as well as the Rising Stars exhibition game, 3-point shooting contest, dunk challenge and more. But festivities will also take place at Pier 48, as well as throughout the city’s beleaguered downtown at Moscone Center and the Hilton Union Square.
There’s both a reputational and financial incentive for the NBA All-Star game festivities to go well for San Francisco, which is still reeling from the effects of the pandemic. Dennis Phillips sees an opportunity to show visitors and viewers, both nationally and worldwide, that “San Francisco isn’t what Fox News told [them],” she said. “The opportunities to do this on a national level are few and far between, so that’s a big part of this.”
Plus, the All-Star game and all of its surrounding events in San Francisco and Oakland are expected to bring in about $350 million in economic impact throughout the Bay Area, with about 135,000 visitors expected to attend from outside the region, according to the Bay Area Host Committee’s economic impact report.
Beyond the main events, city officials are looking to create ancillary events to show off San Francisco’s “local flavor and culture,” Dennis Phillips said. They’re also brainstorming smaller activities that visitors can do throughout the week, like casual pick-up games in local parks, programming for kids, night markets, watch parties and more, Dennis Phillips said. She hopes to have those other events locked down sometime in January.
The hope, she said, is that visitors leave with “that memory of what there was to do in San Francisco” and that the city “becomes more of a place that they want to come to.”
In order to make sure everything goes off without a hitch (and that Charles Barkley doesn’t get more fuel for his hatred of San Francisco), Dennis Phillips said the city is focused on public safety and plans to activate its emergency operations center, similar to what it did with the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last year.
“People need to feel safe and comfortable at any event,” she said. “I think the onus is on San Francisco, given in some cases, what I think is an unfair reputation that we have nationally. We need to do twice as good as any other city to show that we have it nailed down.”
To achieve that, it’ll take support from the police department and the department of emergency management from a crowd management and general safety perspective, as well as from other city agencies to “help people who are on our streets,” she said.
Something Gazetteer will be watching around public safety efforts is whether we see an uptick in homeless sweeps, which the city can now do with abandon, ahead of the event as city leaders try to project a specific image of San Francisco. During APEC, the city cracked down on encampments to the extent that the law allowed them, and that was before a federal court loosened restrictions on when and how the city can conduct homelessness sweeps.
The city’s Homelessness and Supportive Housing Department did not return to Gazetteer’s request for comment about their plans ahead of the NBA All-Star game.
The All-Star game also represents a financial opportunity for the city. Ted Egan, the city’s chief economist, told Gazetteer the sheer volume of visitors is “a fairly big deal” in part due to the “multiplier effects in the economy,” as seen in jobs created, transportation services provided, hotel bookings, and restaurant visits, he said. But the expected impact for the All-Star game is still nowhere near as significant as the upcoming Super Bowl LX, which is projected to result in an economic impact up to $630 million for the total Bay Area and up to $440 million in San Francisco alone in 2026, according to the Host Committee.
The city’s post-pandemic recovery is “still pretty slow,” Egan said, citing September’s economic impact report showing a quarter-over-quarter increase in office vacancy rates, new business formations cooling in the fall after a strong spring, and hotel revenues in August dipping to 61% of 2019 levels. The job market, he said, is gradually recovering but that as “we’re still digging out of a bit of a reputational hole, events like this are helpful for that.”
Like Dennis Phillips, Egan also sees the All-Star game as a “really important” opportunity for San Francisco to boost its reputation. Like APEC, the All-Star game is “another example where there’s some media spotlight on the city and you get kind of free publicity, and hopefully positive publicity,” he said.
The event is only a few days long, but Egan expects “the media effect will be enduring and you’ll give people an opportunity to say different things about San Francisco other than, ‘Hey, I hear you’re in a doom loop.’”
